Alumni Ventures: Acumo – Abhishek Anand & Faiz Azim, PGP 2005

We usually learn about money when we are already making decisions with it. For IIM Bangalore alumni Abhishek Anand and Faiz Azim, that raised a simple question: why not start earlier?

Their own professional journeys took them through banking, entrepreneurship, education, consulting, technology and e-commerce, but eventually brought them to a shared realisation. Students spend years preparing for their careers, yet often enter adulthood without the practical understanding needed to make everyday financial decisions. That realisation led to ACUMO, a financial learning platform that aims to make finance practical, relevant and useful for school students.

From the Finathon, which has brought together students from hundreds of schools, to their recent collaboration with IIMB’s Centre for Capital Markets and Risk Management, Abhishek and Faiz are building a case for treating financial capability as a life skill and starting that learning much earlier.

Tell us a little about yourselves. What were you doing before ACUMO, and what experiences shaped your professional journeys?

We were batchmates at IIM Bangalore, Class of 2005, but our professional journeys after IIMB took us down quite different paths.

Abhishek started his career in banking before moving into entrepreneurship and education. Over the years, he has worked extensively with students on career and higher-education decisions and co-founded Mentors Capital. That experience gave him a close view of what students learn in school, what they are expected to know once they enter college or the workplace, and the significant gap between the two.

Faiz’s career has spanned strategy consulting, entrepreneurship, e-commerce and technology-led businesses. He has held senior strategy and product roles, including serving as Head of Strategy at Myntra, and has built and worked with businesses across different stages of growth.

In many ways, ACUMO brings these two journeys together — education on one side and business, finance and strategy on the other. We wanted to take some of the thinking and skills that we ourselves acquired much later in life and make them accessible to students much earlier.

When and why did you decide to start ACUMO? What gap did you see in financial education that made you feel there was a need for what you were building?

The starting point for ACUMO was a personal realization for both of us. Looking back, we felt that if we had understood finance better at a younger age, we would have started making better financial decisions much earlier in our lives.

That led us to a simple question: Why do students spend so many years studying, yet enter adulthood without understanding many of the financial decisions they will actually have to make?

We believe understanding finance early in life goes a long way. You don’t need to pursue a career in finance — it is a life skill. Irrespective of one’s profession, everyone will earn, spend, save, invest and make decisions involving money.

That became the philosophy behind ACUMO: to move financial education beyond definitions and theory and make it practical, relevant and applicable to real-life decisions. We want students not just to know financial concepts, but to learn how to use them.

Tell us about the Finathon journey. What did the first edition teach you, particularly from seeing students engage with finance in this way? And what does the second edition look like — what has changed, and what can students look forward to this year?

The first Finathon was, in many ways, a validation of our core belief. Students are ready to engage with finance much earlier than we often assume, provided it is made practical and engaging. Over 1,000 students participated in the first edition, and we were particularly encouraged by the curiosity and quality of engagement we saw.

The biggest learning was that students don’t find finance intimidating when it is presented through real-world problems, decision-making and competition rather than just theory.

Edition 2 is a significant step up in scale and experience. We already have 400+ schools registered. Students progress from an individual first round to a team-based second round involving financial problem-solving and spreadsheet tasks, followed by offline City Finals in four cities.

The journey culminates in a two-day National Finals experience at IIM Bangalore, where the best teams from across the country come together to compete, learn and interact.

Our ambition is for Finathon to become an annual national platform that makes learning finance aspirational for school students.

ACUMO has recently signed an MoU with CCMRM at IIM Bangalore, with ACUMO becoming the Centre’s technical and content partner. What does this partnership mean for ACUMO, and how do you see the collaboration helping take practical financial education to a larger student community?

This partnership is particularly meaningful for us, both professionally and personally. As IIM Bangalore alumni, coming back to the institution in this capacity more than two decades after graduating is special.

The collaboration brings together ACUMO’s experience of engaging with school students and CCMRM’s academic expertise and institutional ecosystem. Together, we are working on practical learning modules in areas including Spreadsheet Modelling, Personal Finance and Business Finance.

More importantly, the partnership gives us an opportunity to take high-quality, practical financial education to a much larger student community. Our shared belief is that financial capability should not be limited to students who want a career in finance — it is a life skill that can benefit every student.

“Through this collaboration with ACUMO, CCMRM aims to make practical finance education more accessible and engaging for learners. The integration of interactive spreadsheet-based learning with academic oversight from IIM Bangalore will help students build stronger financial understanding and apply concepts through hands-on learning.”
– Prof. M. Jayadev, Chairperson, Centre for Capital Markets and Risk Management, IIM Bangalore

One of the key components of ACUMO’s financial education approach is practical learning through spreadsheet modelling, and the current Finathon is being supported by Google Chromebooks. What made you focus on spreadsheets as an essential financial skill for students, and how has the collaboration with Google helped strengthen this part of the learning experience?

We see spreadsheets as one of the most practical tools for understanding finance. They allow students to move from simply learning a concept to actually applying it. Whether it is compounding, budgeting, analysing a business or understanding how changing one assumption affects an outcome, spreadsheets make finance tangible.

It is also a skill that students will find useful much beyond finance, in higher education, entrepreneurship and almost any professional career. That is why spreadsheet modelling is a foundational part of ACUMO’s learning approach.

The support from Chromebook by Google for Finathon fits naturally with this philosophy. It reinforces our belief that students should use technology not merely to consume information, but to analyse, model, experiment and solve problems.

ACUMO’s approach goes beyond teaching students about finance and focuses on making finance a life skill. Through your work with students, what have you come to understand differently about the way the next generation thinks about money, careers and entrepreneurship? Has anything surprised you?

What has surprised us is how early students today are exposed to the language of money, investing and entrepreneurship. They hear about stocks, start-ups, valuations, founders and investing through social media, the internet and conversations around them.

But one of our biggest learnings has been that exposure and understanding are not the same thing. A student may have heard about the stock market without understanding risk, or know the valuation of a start-up without understanding how the business actually makes money.

The encouraging part is that this generation is curious, willing to ask questions and ready to engage with finance much earlier than we had assumed. Our role is to give that curiosity structure and help students develop sound financial judgement.

Looking ahead, where do you see ACUMO going from here? What are your plans for expanding its reach, programmes and impact over the next few years?

Our ambition is to build ACUMO into a comprehensive financial-learning ecosystem for school students, with Finathon as an important part of that journey. We want Finathon to become an annual national platform that students look forward to participating in, much like established competitions in mathematics, science or debating.

Alongside Finathon, we are building structured learning programmes in spreadsheet modelling, personal finance and business finance, with deeper areas of investing, financial analysis and entrepreneurship to follow.

Over the next few years, we want to take this ecosystem to a much larger community of schools and students across India and eventually beyond. The larger vision remains simple: to make financial capability a core life skill for every student.

Both of you have made the transition from established corporate careers to entrepreneurship. How difficult was it to leave that relative security behind? Looking back, has the leap been worth it? What have you learnt as entrepreneurs, and what would you tell someone considering making a similar move?

For Abhishek, the move towards education actually started well before he left the corporate world. He realised quite early that education was something he cared deeply about, so for a period he moonlighted as a teacher while continuing with his corporate career. It was his way of testing whether this was just an interest or something he genuinely wanted to build his life around. He loved interacting with students, and that eventually gave him the conviction to make the switch. Looking back, it has been completely worth it. Over the years, he has built a rich community of students, and the affection and respect he receives from them remains one of the most rewarding parts of his journey.

For Faiz, education also has a personal connection .He comes from a family of teachers. After spending a significant part of his career in consulting, strategy and building businesses, ACUMO is an opportunity to bring together that background with a desire to spread financial awareness and make practical finance accessible to young people.

If there is one thing we would tell someone considering entrepreneurship, it is this: you should genuinely love the space you are entering, because the journey will test that conviction. At the same time, you have to be extremely adaptable in how you pursue that purpose. The mission may remain constant, but the product, approach or business model you begin with may evolve considerably as you learn from the people you are trying to serve.

And finally, choose the people you build with very carefully. The team — and particularly your co-founder — can be as important as the idea itself. Entrepreneurship has enough uncertainty already; having someone alongside you whose values you trust and whose strengths complement yours makes an enormous difference.

For Abhishek and Faiz, ACUMO is rooted in a lesson they learnt themselves: financial understanding is something most people develop only when they are already expected to make important decisions. Their work is about moving that learning earlier, when students are still curious, open to new ideas and building the habits that will shape their adult lives.

The Finathon has shown them that students are ready for this kind of learning when finance is presented through real problems and decisions rather than just theory. As they expand ACUMO through Finathon, practical learning programmes and the CCMRM partnership, their larger ambition is to make financial capability a life skill that students develop before they need it.

Learn more about ACUMO and the Finathon: ACUMO