ARETE HISTORY

Arete Financial Partners was founded in 2007 by Arete's MD, Rajiv Agarwal with the main office located in Singapore. Over the years, Arete has helped a broad and diverse set of clients across Asia, Middle East & Africa. Initially focused on addressing clients' Transformation agenda's, Arete quickly grew to provide complimentary services and provided end-to-end investment advisory and talent development to help clients realize full potential of transactions or augment client resources with placements or training.

Since inception, Arete has opened an office in New Delhi and London to cater to the Regional & European needs of our client base.

Rajiv Agarwal

Rajiv Agarwal has over 25 years' experience working in different Asian and European countries. He started his Arete Financial Partners focused on Strategic Consulting, Business Transformation Services including Digital, Transaction Services, Investment Advisory Services and business support services.

Past Engagements have involved developing retail bank strategy, Branch transformation from processing centers to sales centers, developing Risk capabilities, Call Center Design, HR practices design and operations transformation & technology selection & implementation. He has been involved in Investment advisory transactions on both Buy side and Sell side. He has successfully executed Post merger Integration work.

Prior to this, Rajiv was CEO for Consumer Banking, Europe, ABN Amro Bank NV based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He was responsible to expand consumer banking franchise in Europe.

Prior to this he was CFO & COO for Private banking, Commercial and Consumer banking for Asia Pacific for ABN Amro based in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Prior to joining ABN Amro, Rajiv worked for Citibank for 13 years in different functional areas: Client service, Investment Products, Financial Control, Sales & Marketing, Operations & Technology in different countries: Singapore, Philippines, Japan and India.

He has worked on large scale transformation of businesses and turnarounds. He has successfully launched new businesses, new products, new processes and Performance management dashboards.

Rajiv has done Advanced Management Program from Wharton School of Management, University of Pennsylvania. He has done his MBA from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahemdabad, India. He holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, India.