Vikram Akula

Indian American entrepreneur and banker

Vikram Akula (born 7 November 1968) is an American banker and the founder of SKS Microfinance (now BFIL), a micro finance company and former chairperson of Bharat Financial Inclusion Ltd. SKS was an organization that offered microloans and insurance to poor women in India. He stepped down as SKS Chairperson in November 2011 and became Chairperson Emeritus. Akula is also a founding investor and a Director in AgSri, a sustainable agriculture company focused on helping small sugarcane farmers reduce water use, and a Director in Bodhi Educational Society, which establishes schools for underprivileged children in India. Akula currently serves as Chairperson of VAYA Finserv Private Limited. Founded in 2014, the India based company markets financial services to low income groups on behalf of partner banks.

Akula's father, Akula V. Krishna, was a surgeon who settled in Schenectady, New York, where Akula went to school. Akula graduated from Niskayuna High School in 1986 and enrolled at Tufts University, where he graduated as a double major in philosophy and English with honors in 1990. He went to Yale University for a M. A. in International Relations, and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for an action research microfinance project in India in 1994–95. He completed his Ph. D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2004. In 2019 20, he was a Distinguished Career Fellow at Stanford University.

Upon graduating from Tufts, Akula returned to India for a short while in 1990 and worked with the Deccan Development Society, a small grassroots rural non profit organization. He then returned to USA and worked for the Worldwatch Institute in Washington D. C. as a researcher, where he wrote articles about poverty and sustainable development. During his Fulbright, Akula returned to the Deccan Development Society, where he helped manage the organization's microfinance program. Akula saw the limitation of non profit microfinance and proposed a more market based approach. He outlines his philosophy in his book, A Fistful of Rice; My Unexpected Quest to End Poverty Through Profitability, published by Harvard Business Press in 2010. In November 2008, SKS raised an equity investment of $75 million, the largest equity investment raised by an MFI to that date. SKS raised additional equity from Infosys founder Narayan Murthy and Bajaj Allianz, which represented the first ever microfinance investment by an insurance company. In mid August 2010, SKS Microfinance had an initial public offering (IPO) on the Bombay Stock Exchange, which raised $350 million and was oversubscribed 14 times and which included anchor investors such as George Soros. According to the company's website, SKS Microfinance has disbursed more than $15 billion in micro loans. Akula resigned from the role of Executive Chairperson on 23 November 2011 and he relinquished his role as a promoter of SKS on 3 May 2014.

When founding SKS, Akula drew inspiration from the work of Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel prize winner and founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, one of the world's first microfinance organizations. In a face to face debate with Yunus at the 2010 Clinton Global Initiative, Akula insisted that going public is the only way for an MFI to raise sufficient funds to provide micro loans for billions of poor people in need worldwide.

In late 2010, the state government of Andhra Pradesh accused microfinance companies, including the then market leader SKS, for the suicides of poor, debt ridden residents of the state that year. Two investigations into the incident, the first an independent investigation commissioned by SKS, and the second commissioned by an industry umbrella group, both pointed to SKS involvement in the suicides, and said that SKS employees had engaged in illegal practices like verbal and physical harassment, coercion, and public humiliation, in order to recover debts. Akula addresses the controversy in his book, Micro Meltdown: The Inside Story of the Rise, Fall, and Resurgence of the World's Most Valuable Microlender.