As businesses navigate uncertainty and evolving capital needs, finance is taking on a more strategic role in shaping growth and resilience.
In an exclusive conversation with The Mainstream, Dr. Rishi Vyas, Head – Finance/Banking at Patel Engineering Ltd, shares his insights on the evolving role of finance leaders, the importance of strategic capital allocation, building financial resilience, embracing innovative financing models, and evaluating technology and AI for long-term business value.
He also discusses how finance can move beyond traditional reporting to become a strategic driver of growth, resilience and competitive advantage.
1. As finance continues to move beyond traditional reporting, how has your role as a finance leader evolved in influencing business strategy, growth and long-term value creation?
Finance today can’t sit at the back end of the business, only closing books and reporting numbers. My role has moved into shaping the strategy itself — how we structure capital, how we fund growth, and how we manage risk on the balance sheet. A good example is what we did post-COVID in the EPC infra space. We didn’t just wait for bank credit to become available again; we built new financial products ourselves, like an MSME exchange facility where we discount and pay our MSME suppliers on an unsecured basis at 7 to 8%, well below regular bank rates. That’s not accounting, that’s finance actively creating value — for us, for our vendors, and for the ecosystem we operate in.
2. When business growth and financial resilience need to move together, how do you approach balancing profitability, investment and long-term value?
I look at it as three levers that have to move together, not in isolation. On the resilience side, we’ve worked steadily on debt reduction, which in turn got our external rating upgraded from BBB to A in last 5 years — and a better rating gives you cheaper, more flexible capital for the next round of investment. On the growth side, we’ve been selective rather than aggressive in bidding, which has helped us build a healthier order book instead of just a bigger one. So, the sequence for us has been: strengthen the balance sheet first, let that unlock better-priced capital, and then deploy that capital into growth that we’re confident will convert into real value, not just topline.
3. How can finance leaders bring greater strategic rigour to investment and capital allocation decisions while ensuring that resources are directed towards the organisation’s most important growth priorities?
Rigour, for me, comes down to saying no more often than saying yes. We’ve deliberately bid selectively rather than chasing every order in the market, and that discipline is what has helped us improve our order book quality and cross 5,000 crore in revenue. Capital allocation isn’t just a finance exercise done after the business has decided what it wants — finance has to be at the table when those growth priorities are being set, questioning whether a project actually strengthens the portfolio or just adds size. That’s the rigour that protects long-term value.
4. As organisations undergo finance transformation, what changes in processes, technology and operating models can help finance teams become more agile and responsive to business needs?
For us, transformation hasn’t been about a single big technology rollout — it’s been about rethinking how we access and structure capital itself. Take surety bonds: we were among the first companies to get sanctions from insurers like The New India Assurance, Liberty General Insurance and Tata AIG General Insurance, starting with bid bonds and now performance and advance bonds too. That single change has eased a lot of pressure on our banking limits and opens up a parallel channel to raise facilities on far lighter collateral than a consortium bank would need. Similarly, we’ve used equipment leasing and sale-and-leaseback on unencumbered assets to unlock project-specific liquidity quickly. These are operating-model changes as much as financial ones, and they’ve made the finance function far more responsive to what the business actually needs, when it needs it.
5. When evaluating technology and digital investments, how can finance leaders look beyond the initial cost to assess their potential impact on productivity, scalability, business performance and long-term returns?
I don’t evaluate technology investments purely on upfront cost versus immediate savings. I look at whether the investment improves productivity, scales with business growth, strengthens operational resilience, and generates returns over the long term. For example, our move toward digital financing platforms and insurer-backed instruments wasn’t the cheapest option initially, but it diversified our liquidity sources, reduced process constraints, and gave us greater flexibility as the business grew. Those benefits ultimately extended well beyond the initial investment.”
6. With AI, automation and data reshaping the finance function, how should finance leaders evaluate emerging technologies when the business value may not always be immediately measurable?
I treat these the way we treated surety bonds and MSME financing when they were new — as calculated bets rather than guaranteed wins. You won’t always have a clean ROI on day one, especially with something like AI or automation, where the value shows up in speed, fewer errors and better decisions rather than a direct saving you can point to immediately. What I look for is whether it’s solving a real bottleneck we already feel in the business, and whether we’re comfortable being an early mover on it, the same way we were early with insurers on surety bonds when the rest of the sector was still relying only on bank facilities.
7. During periods of economic or business uncertainty, what role can finance play in strengthening organisational resilience while continuing to support growth and strategic priorities?
This is where finance earns its place, honestly. During and after COVID, a lot of EPC players took heavy haircuts and accounts turned non-performing because they were entirely dependent on the banking sector. We took a different path — reducing debt, getting our external rating upgraded, raising an NCD of 90 crore, and building out surety bonds as an alternative to bank guarantees. That combination meant we weren’t fully exposed when the sector was under stress, and now that the industry is growing again with government support and on-time payments, we’re in a position to bid selectively and grow our order book instead of just recovering. Resilience isn’t about avoiding growth during uncertainty — it’s about having enough alternative levers that you can keep growing while everyone else is playing defence.
8. Looking ahead, what capabilities and priorities will define the modern finance leader, and how can finance evolve from a support function into a true competitive advantage for the business?
The finance leaders who’ll stand out are the ones willing to build new financial products for their own sector instead of only using what banks offer. We didn’t wait for the market to solve our liquidity or collateral problems — we brought insurers into a space that was purely bank-driven, we created an MSME payment mechanism that helped our own supply chain, and clients like NHPC have since started accepting these surety-backed structures too. That’s the shift — from managing capital that’s handed to you, to actively shaping how capital flows into your sector. When finance starts doing that, it stops being a support function and becomes a genuine source of competitive advantage.
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