The Quintessence of a Glorious Career – Ravi Suri
With a distinguished career in banking, Ravi has worked with GE Capital, ABN AMRO, Bank Standard Chartered Bank and KPMG at global leadership positions. He is currently the Senior Advisor and Global Head of Infrastructure Finance at KPMG – a multinational professional services network and one of the Big Four accounting organizations where he is predominantly responsible for KPMG’s sustainable infrastructure finance vertical.
With over 25 years of illustrious work experience, Ravi brings with him strong industry insights and professional experience in the power, renewables, transport, infra, and oil and gas sectors. Throughout his career, he has led large complex advisory projects in these sectors across Asia, Africa, Middle East, Europe and Americas in over 50 countries. He was also featured on Emirates News discussing the findings of KPMG’s Autonomous Vehicles Readiness Index (AVRI) which evaluates the preparedness of countries globally to accommodate driverless vehicles and UAE’s ranking thereof.
Ravi is of the opinion that with the intersection of Artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, Big Data, 3D and block chain into infrastructure being an inexorable event, the technology impact in this field will be significant resulting in a number of disruptions. He emphasizes that Risk mitigation for both debt and equity will no longer be immutable as it has been during the last two decades and newer methods will need to be adopted. In his insight on Appropriate risk mitigation in infrastructure finance, he quotes “In the future, infrastructure funds and pension funds are more likely to directly finance projects as they are cost effective and represent a good liability-asset match.” Taking in account the above technology risk challenges, Ravi continues to strive on cutting edge solutions to ensure infrastructure projects are bankable.
Ravi is an alumnus of America’s most prestigious universities: North Western University where he did his master’s in chemical engineering and at Harvard Business School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of Cambridge, he completed his executive education programmes.
With his zeal about sustainability, Ravi strongly believes in fighting the challenges facing climate change. He feels sustainable finance is a force for good to achieve this. He is engaged in doing some path breaking work, including development of the hydrogen industry and helping countries meet their net zero targets. His initiatives to help fight climate change by developing sustainable infrastructure, and his efforts to finance power projects in Africa under President Barack Obama’s Power Africa initiative, when at Standard Chartered Bank, is testament to his philosophy that infrastructure projects ameliorate the living conditions of the poor, and help tackle climate risk. In his own humble and modest way, he is trying to make the world a better place to live in for future generations.
