Brickwork Ratings is a Bangalore-based company incorporated in 2007 with the mission of providing unbiased information to Indian investors for making better investment decisions. Mr. Balasubramanian, Mr. Vivek Kulkarni and Mr. Ravishankar are the founder directors of Brickwork Ratings. Mr. Balasubramanian is the former Chairman of SIDBI and a pioneer in the banking industry. He was instrumental in setting up of SMERA – an SME rating agency. He has tremendous credit experience with the Bank of Baroda. Mr. Ravishankar is a financial professional with a rich experience of over 25 years in BFSI segment. He was Managing Director of Asia-Pacific Risk Solutions business of Standard and Poor's.
The initial concept of Brickwork Ratings was conceived by Mr. Vivek Kulkarni after the success of providing high-end financial services to the global market through Brickwork India Pvt. Ltd. – a knowledge process outsourcing company.
Mr. Kulkarni’s domain expertise being financial research, and as director on the Board of the Bombay Stock Exchange, he believes that retail investors invariably lose out while sophisticated investment bankers, brokers and foreign institutional investors enter and exit the market at the right time. With the mission of helping investors make informed investment decisions, Vivek decided to extend knowledge-based services to the domestic market through Brickwork Ratings, which has developed a unique ratings methodology. Brickwork Ratings is the fifth Credit Rating Agency to be recognized by SEBI. The other four are CRISIL (Standard & Poor), ICRA (Moody’s), Fitch and CARE. Mr. Balasubramanian the former CMD of SIDBI is Vivek’s partner in this venture.
Mr. Kulkarni has more than 27 years of experience in government & private sectors, and has played a pivotal role in departments like Finance and IT & biotechnology secretariats of the Government of Karnataka as well as institutes like CRISIL and SEBI. Subsequently, through his entrepreneurial ventures, Mr. Kulkarni provided business analytics services with technical support to high-tech companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Real Network, etc. In 2006 he pioneered the ‘remote executive analyst’ concept through Brickwork India, which received world-wide acclaim and publicity through various publications such as the New York Times bestseller authors, Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat) and Tim Ferris (4-hour work week). Other publications like Business Week - China-India survey; Fortune; London Sunday Times; Esquire as well as several TV channels in the US and Europe have given coverage to Mr. Kulkarni.
Mr. Kulkarni has been the finance Professor at Boston University, later professor at IIM Bangalore and currently at Dept. of Management Studies, IISc Bangalore. Some examples of the extensive projects taken under his leadership are: training employees of a Middle East multi-billion dollar bank on Risk Management; coaching & mentoring a group of senior chartered accountants to assist NY based multi-billion dollar hedge fund; Valuation models for a US M&A Advisory Firm; Procurement consulting & due diligence of Indian suppliers for one of the largest aluminum manufacturing companies. Several other projects in Market Research & Financial research as well as credit analysis for CFOs, investment bankers, hedge fund managers and mutual fund professionals across the globe, have been completed successfully.
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