InCred Capital appoints Abhinav Khanna as chief executive officer, capital markets

MUMBAI: Investment banks love to talk about building franchises; rather fewer of them actually go out and hire the person who can do it. InCred Capital has just done exactly that, appointing Abhinav Khanna as chief executive officer, capital markets, handing him the keys to its institutional equities, equity capital markets and asset services businesses, with an explicit brief to put his foot down on growth.

Khanna arrives with the kind of resume that tends to turn heads in Indian finance circles. Over 25 years spent across India, the UK and the Middle East, most recently as managing director and chief business officer, global, at ValueQuest Investment Advisors, where he steered global business strategy. Before that, a decade-plus stint at Citigroup Global Markets, culminating in a role as managing director and head of equity, India, the sort of pedigree that signals he has sat on both the buy side and the institutional broking side of the table, and understands what each wants from the other.

The appointment is being pitched, rightly, as the next phase for InCred Capital’s equities franchise. The firm says it is expanding across research, sales and trading, block execution, equity capital markets and corporate access, a fairly comprehensive list that suggests this is not a token hire but a genuine scaling-up effort. Bhupinder Singh, founder and group chief executive at InCred, did not mince words either, calling Khanna one of the most respected professionals in the industry and backing him to build one of India’s leading institutional equities franchises, strong language for a market not short on institutional equities operations already.

Khanna, for his part, struck a similarly ambitious note, framing InCred as one of India’s most exciting financial services platforms precisely because it blends entrepreneurial thinking with institutional rigour, and signalling intent to deepen relationships with institutional investors and corporates while sharpening research, advice and execution.

The timing is instructive. India’s capital markets have been on a tear, with a deep pipeline of IPOs, block trades and equity fundraises keeping institutional desks busy, and InCred is clearly positioning itself to grab a bigger share of that action rather than watch from the sidelines. Bringing in a leader with Citigroup-calibre global markets experience and buy-side exposure through ValueQuest gives the firm both the credibility and the network to compete more seriously with the bulge-bracket and established domestic players.

For InCred Capital, this looks less like a routine leadership change and more like a statement of intent, and Khanna’s brief now is to turn that ambition into market share.