“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

These words by Robert Frost have echoed through many moments of my professional life, but never more than when I reflect on how my entrepreneurial journey as a wealth advisor began.

I started my career as a management trainee at ANZ Grindlays Bank, which later became part of Standard Chartered, and spent seventeen years with the Bank in India and Singapore before returning home to lead the Private Banking division for the firm in India. Those years offered a close view of how the banking industry organised itself. Large institutions shaped client engagement, product-led propositions dominated business strategy, and distribution incentives were firmly embedded in the system.

By most conventional measures, it was a very successful career. But as time passed, my success sat uneasily next to the growing realisation that the system rewarded outcomes I did not always …