Anju spent over two decades as a banking executive at Citibank and Standard Chartered Bank, based in Singapore, in senior leadership roles, including Global Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Risk Officer, Chief Operating Officer, and Digital Banking Head. In addition, she was a member of SCB’s global Executive Leadership Team, the Global Technology & Operations Management Group, and the Global Risk Management Group.

You can read more about her professional background and awards and honors here. 

Her interest in ‘financial inclusion’ started in 2013 during her discussions with Prof David Lee in Singapore. Since then, the work on financial inclusion and financial well-being has become her personal passion.

In 2016, she was selected as a Fulbright Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, working with Professor Takeo Hoshi. Her research focused on the use of technology to support financial inclusion. She published a report in 2018 in partnership with the IFC (part of the World Bank), and Stanford University titled Financial Inclusion in the Digital Age.

She started the Financial Inclusion Institute after her Fulbright Fellowship at Stanford. She continued her work in this area as a Distinguished Careers Institute (DCI) Fellow at Stanford in 2017-18, under the guidance of Professor Phil Pizzo. She also collaborated with Professor Kenneth Singleton at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business to help introduce a Fintech and Financial Inclusion course for MBA students. They also collaborated on the report Financial Inclusion in the Digital Age.

Stanford is where the project on financial well-being was born. However, the specific focus on the financial well-being of older adults began during her tenure at the National University of Singapore (NUS) as Director, Productive Longevity, in 2020-21. This is part of Singapore’s Health District initiative.

Her interest and research continued during her Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency at Lake Como, Italy, in 2022. The suggestion to create a think tank for “Designing for a 100-Year Life” and build a website as an ongoing source of knowledge came from her wonderful fellow Bellagio Residents.

If you are working in the area of the financial well-being of older adults, please get in touch with us. We would love to hear from you and see how we can collaborate. You can contact us here, and subscribe to our periodic newsletters at the bottom of the page. 

Anju is a Singaporean citizen and lives in Singapore with her family. Her interests include reading, yoga, traveling, and pets. She has been to over 60 countries and hopes to visit many more. While at Stanford as DCI Fellows, she and her husband Abhi did a 10,000-mile cross-country road trip in the US with their labrador retriever Zen over eight weeks. Zen’s adventures and misadventures in Australia, Singapore, and the United States have been captured beautifully by Abhi in the travelogue “Angel Wings: Paw-prints on three continents.”