Radhika Bhachu left BlackRock and returned home to rethink wealth

On the 10th floor of ABC Place in Nairobi’s Westlands, Radhika Bhachu doesn’t offer you tea. No small ceremony to ease you in. She’s already mid-thought when you sit down, like you’ve walked into a conversation she’s been having with herself all morning.

If we weren’t doing this interview, she says, she’d be on investor calls. Properly in it. Updating her pipeline, responding to questions, and nudging conversations forward. In between, she’d be with her team—sales, marketing, client service—trying to get a feel of things on the ground. Are customers complaining? What’s slowing them down? Where can AI help? Then maybe coffee, but not the relaxed kind. The kind where you’re still half-working, just without your laptop open.

She speaks quickly, but not nervously. There’s a rhythm to it. Before this, she was at BlackRock for five years as a relationship manager, helping investors build wealth quietly, predictably, over time. There are systems, structures and a lot of long-term thinking. Then she came back to Kenya in 2020 and found something else: people saving, hustling, building, but not quite investing in the way she had seen elsewhere.

Now she’s trying to build that bridge through Ndovu, a Nairobi-based wealth management startup. Lately, what’s been sitting with her is a tension she doesn’t try to dress up. Last year, the company found that most of its revenue was coming from a small group of customers. The obvious move was to lean into that, middle income and above, the ones already closest to investing.

It makes sense. It’s business. But that’s not why she started. “The vision is still everyone,” she says. “But you can’t do everything at once.” She pauses, briefly, then shrugs it off. “It’s just sequencing.”

I spoke to Radhika about the path the BlackRock alumni took from the corridors of global finance to the messy, unpredictable business of getting Africans to invest.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

If we weren’t doing this interview, what would a perfect afternoon look like for you?

Right now, I’m fundraising, so a perfect afternoon would involve investor calls, updating my investor pipeline, and responding to questions. I also oversee the distribution team, so I’d be working with sales, marketing, and client service to understand how business is going—are we getting customer complaints? How can we use AI to streamline tasks? So, really, thinking about distribution strategy and fundraising. It would probably end with coffee with a client or an investor.

What’s been occupying your mind lately, something you keep coming back to?

Last year, we realised that, like many businesses, 80% of our revenue comes from 20% of our clients. Our vision is that in a decade, every African will be a capital market investor. But the reality is that as an African startup, there’s not enough funding to go after the entire value chain—middle income, high net worth, and low income all require significant resources.

Last year, we had to make a difficult decision: with our current funding and team, we needed to focus on the low-hanging fruit, middle-income and above. But as a founder, I started this to help everyone participate in wealth creation. We’ve partnered with banks and telcos to embed our solutions, but it’s disappointing that as a chief executive office (CEO), the right business decision is to move toward momentum—because that helps us grow revenue faster, increase our cash, and eventually serve smaller holders. It’s just sequencing. But it weighs on me. That, and cybersecurity.

You grew up between cultures. How did that shape your earliest understanding of money, security, and ambition?

I’m a Kenyan-Indian, and that’s been amazing. Kenyan culture is very kind and community-led; people help each other. Indian culture thinks more about the future: you build wealth not just for this generation, but for your children’s children. What I think our culture could do better is talk about money at the dinner table. We didn’t, but we knew our parents had a business. They’d say, “Go have coffee with someone, see what they do, talk to that uncle at a party.” That helped you figure out what to study.

But no one teaches you what to do once you have money. We’re launching a custodial product for children—parents manage it, but kids can research and see how their investments perform. That teaches budgeting, decision-making, and opportunity cost. Unfortunately, that’s taking a lower priority right now due to capital constraints.

Was there a defining moment growing up when you realised money, or the lack of it, shapes how people move through the world?

An unfortunate lesson about the world is that if you have money, you matter to somebody; if you have no money, you matter to nobody. And that’s just a really sad reality of the world. And I think growing up, not so much, but now, living in a social media age, it’s so apparent. For me, it was when I was younger. I lost my mom, and so my dad sent me to school, and I started doing the paper round (delivering newspapers).

I was in Canada, and we used to do the paper round to make money. I’m very fortunate; everything was painful, but we started learning that to make money, you have to work really hard. And there’s a saying in our culture, actually: making money is the easy part, but keeping it, you know? Doing the paper round, then actually getting a job at 16; that’s when I was like, “wow, okay, making money is really hard.” That’s why, when you have money, there is some childhood stuff that kind of links back to saying I have to be successful because I want to be able to give my family everything they need.

And you have to make sure that you’re working hard for money. And now it’s changed into: how can you be more valuable, and how can you create money not the traditional way — you know, graduate, get a job — and now it’s like, “Okay, well, I’ve got this money, and this is going really well, what else can I do?” But we’re seeing that through Kenyan culture, which is really nice.

What did your parents teach you about wealth that you’ve had to unlearn?

The limited mindset: “We don’t have this much money.” Also, that generation was very competitive, always comparing with peers. Now there’s so much abundance that ten competitors can all do well. I’m unlearning that money is only available to the few. Historically, the rich had access to global and local capital markets, but the middle class didn’t. We’re changing that.

You had a front-row seat to global finance before Ndovu. At what point did you think Africa’s wealth problem isn’t access, it’s structure?