Why Finance Technology Keeps Failing After You Buy It · Shoma Sinha, Vikaraa

What we talked about.

Shoma Sinha, founder of Vikaraa, joins Sunny Ray to explain why finance technology so often fails after companies buy it. Drawing on more than a decade of enterprise experience at institutions including Mizuho Bank, Mashreq Bank, and ICICI Bank, Sinha describes a recurring pattern: finance teams, lean and time sensitive, receive systems built by IT teams that lack finance domain knowledge, forcing staff to export data into spreadsheets and manually fill the gaps. She argues the problem is solved backwards, and that building finance expertise into systems from the start can eliminate most of that manual work. Sinha traces her path from India to Silicon Valley, where she saw the same gap at hyperscale startups, and shares how a personal loss became the catalyst for leaving stable enterprise roles to found Vikaraa, a consulting practice that modernizes financial systems through automation and scalable processes. She reflects on the discomfort of building credibility from scratch, the value of persistent learning and networking, and the many moments of doubt along the way. The conversation was cut short by connection issues and the two agreed to reschedule.

Vikaraa founder Shoma Sinha on why finance teams keep patching broken systems with spreadsheets, and how personal loss pushed her to fix it.

The questions, and the answers.

What are you building at Vikaraa? Give me the 30 second pitch.

I am Shoma Sinha, founder of Vikaraa. Vikaraa is a consulting practice where we help companies build finance infrastructure. In simpler words, we modernize financial systems through automation, smarter use of technology, and scalable processes, so companies can achieve financial and operational readiness.

You never planned to be an entrepreneur, and losing a family member was the tipping point. What changed in you?

I had more than a decade of enterprise experience at large financial institutions like Mizuho Bank, Mashreq Bank, and ICICI Bank. I kept seeing the same pattern: finance is time sensitive and data sensitive, but IT built our systems without finance domain knowledge, so we massaged everything through spreadsheets. I saw the same gap at Silicon Valley startups. When I went through a personal loss, I realized time is now, and that pushed me to build the solution myself.

What was the first thing you did differently after that?

I began to learn extensively. I had always had a learning curve, but after starting Vikaraa I became bold enough to ask people, both people I knew and strangers, where to find things and talk about my goals. People I barely met gave me small pointers about what I should be catching up on. My biggest takeaway is to keep learning, keep asking, and keep giving back to people who are starting out now.

Was there a moment where you nearly did not go through with it?

There were a lot of moments. When I decided to be an entrepreneur, I closed all my other sources of income and refused any distraction, so building a company with just a professional resume was itself a challenge. Nobody knew me, so converting from Shoma to the Vikaraa team was very hard. There were months of continuously pitching and waiting for calls, but I learned we just keep improving.