Rohit Chopra, Gaurav Sharma, Kriti Sarav among leaders who “know the importance personal finance means to everybody”
Three Indian-Americans are among Money magazine’s 50 Changemakers — innovating in the world of money — from a variety of different professions, from technology, art, politics, and activism.
But “they all are leaders in their own right, and they all know the importance personal finance means to everybody,” says the magazine which launched the list as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations.
The three Indian Americans featured in the list are: Rohit Chopra, director of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB); Gaurav Sharma, CEO and co-founder of Capitalize; and Kriti Sarav, podcaster.
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Chopra has helmed CFPB, created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act in the aftermath of the Great Recession, to protect families from deceptive and abusive financial practices, since October 2021. Despite his short tenure, the Biden-appointed director has already made an outsized impact on the wallets of Americans all across the country, Money says.
“As far as financial regulators go, 40-year-old Chopra is young, though he’s certainly not inexperienced. In fact, he’s a bit of a financial Forrest Gump,” says the magazine.
In the leadup to and during the 2008 financial crisis, Chopra was studying housing finance and banking regulation as part of the MBA program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. In 2010, Chopra served as the agency’s first assistant director and student loan ombudsman.
And in 2018, Chopra became a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, where he worked behind the scenes on some of the largest data scandal cases in recent memory, including the Equifax breach and Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica fiasco.
He served as an FTC commissioner until October 2021, the month he was sworn in as the CFPB’s third director.
Chopra’s background is key to understanding his approach to being one of the most powerful financial regulators in the country, Money says. In short, it culminates into a philosophy that the CFPB should be a “financial first responder,” as he calls it, with the ability to act quickly and decisively in response to economic changes.
While Chopra has a throng of fans, especially in consumer advocacy circles, his strong-arm approach has garnered criticism from many Republicans and business lobbyists.
When asked about the criticism, Chopra brushed it off, saying he focuses more on consumer complaints in the CFPB’s database than on complaints made by politicians and lobbyists.
To bring rollovers into 401(k) retirement accounts into the 21st century, Sharma led Capitalize built a platform to connect people with their old 401(k)s, help them find an individual retirement account (IRA) to put it in and then help them transfer the money into that new account. For free.
Capitalize has “mapped the rollover procedures for the largest 401(k) providers in the country, so once we know where your money is, we can help you move that money in the most efficient way,” Sharma says.
The issue he’s trying to solve has to do with the fact that 401(k)s are tied to a person’s employer. The savings are yours, yes, but they don’t automatically follow you from gig to gig.
According to a study by Capitalize, about 24.3 million retirement accounts have been abandoned by job-changers. The amount of money in those accounts? A whopping $1.35 trillion.
That’s a big deal. Capitalize analysts point out that a forgotten retirement account can potentially mean a loss of nearly $700,000 in retirement savings over someone’s lifetime.
At a time when most financial transactions — think: banking, trading, paying friends back for dinner — can be done on your phone, Sharma notes that the retirement industry has been slow to embrace change.
But Capitalize is innovating, and evolving, as time goes on. At first, Sharma says he wanted Capitalize just to solve the problem of finding an old account and getting the money easily into an IRA. Looking forward, though, “our bigger mission is helping the issue of saving for retirement,” he says.
During the 2020 lockdowns, Chicago high schooler Kriti Sarav created her own podcast — WhyFI Matter$ — to demystify personal finance for her peers.
“Seeing how the whole economy crashed and how people were struggling made me realize that learning about [financial] concepts at a young age is extremely important,” Sarav says.
The solution was her podcast, which is designed to be fun and trendy for teenaged listeners. Its logo is a lime-green piggy bank wearing sunglasses, and its tongue-in-cheek mission? “How not to live in your parents’ basement.”
Now a senior, Sarav has been building WhyFI Matter$ for more than two years, finding time for research, interviews and editing in her busy high school schedule.
She’s tackled topics that many adults struggle to grasp, from the student debt crisis to cryptocurrency to the economics of truffle mushrooms.
Read: 2 Indian-Americans in Money magazine’s top 50 changemakers (December 12, 2022)
WhyFI Matter$ is packed with facts and Sarav’s own sharp analysis, but it never feels like school. There are no preachy lectures about saving your allowance, either.
The podcast also hosts online workshops for younger teens, with activities designed to help kids understand terms like income and debt. While those topics might not always be as flashy as current events, Sarav says they’re an essential foundation — and they can be entertaining, too.
“The important part is starting young so that when you do have to manage your money when you’re older,” Sarav says, “you’ll have the tools to do that, and you won’t be in a state of panic.”