Prabhay started his career in finance at Citigroup, working on export and trade finance transactions such as aircraft and shipping financings. He then transitioned to management consulting to supplement his finance background with skills in business strategy and operational improvement. He enjoyed solving business problems, but also wanted to tackle business challenges in emerging markets. Before Columbia, he spent the summer working for Balloon Ventures, managing a program to support high-potential entrepreneurs in Uganda to scale and grow, in partnership with Citigroup’s Investment Bank. His experience in Uganda convinced him that he wanted to incorporate social impact in to his future career in a significant way, while continuing to build his financial and business skillsets.
During his first year at Columbia Business School, one of his goals was to learn about the developing area of impact and ESG-integrated investing. Although he had worked on high-impact projects on the ground in developing countries, he wanted exposure to how large organizations are attempting to scale positive impact through financial market activity. The opportunity to work on sustainable investing at Morgan Stanley was a great way to learn from a leading player in the field.
He spent his summer as a Sustainable Investing Fellow on the Morgan Stanley Wealth Management Investing with Impact team. During the fellowship, his main project was to develop a community investing toolkit for clients and advisors to help investors to integrate community investing strategies into their impact investing portfolios including broad mission and place-based alignment. He also undertook a number of other projects including a client RFP focused on sustainable and impact investing, assessment of third-party manager strategies’ alignment to the Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs), performance reporting for the Morgan Stanley Donor Advised Fund, and analysis of potential impact investing products for Morgan Stanley’s Investing with Impact Platform, such as impact notes and certificates.
Throughout the summer, he engaged with a variety of Morgan Stanley teams deeply involved with advancing sustainable finance: office of community reinvestment, green bonds, multicultural client strategy, global sustainable finance, and sustainability research. In addition, he had opportunities to build his network and was fortunate to meet a number of portfolio managers from mainstream and boutique asset managers who are leading the charge on developing sustainable and impact investing funds for clients. These conversations provided a platform for him to understand how different fund managers view ESG/impact and how they incorporate it into an investment strategy. Overall, the experience was an invaluable way to understand how Morgan Stanley as a firm is advancing sustainable investing, as well as how the overall market is developing and the impact investing themes where investor demand is growing, such as climate change, gender diversity, and community impact.