Team
The people who do the work.
Risk Nova is run by its founder, with a senior advisor beside him. Both have been the Chief Risk Officer, and both have run the commercial side of a lending business.
On this page
Rick Nguyen, Founder and Principal
Swaroop Shah, Advisor
Rick Nguyen
A risk and digital-finance executive with 25+ years across Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Equally a Chief Risk Officer and a business builder, and unusually for this field, the person who builds the tooling as well.
Nguyễn Thành Phú. Based in Ho Chi Minh City. M.A. in Development Economics, Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
What he brings
A Chief Risk Officer by trade. Credit is the largest exposure in a lending book, and the seat also carries operational, fraud, model and concentration risk, the appetite framework above them, and the reporting that goes to the board and the regulator.
In every CRO role he has owned risk operations as well as policy: underwriting and approval operations, collections, NPL recovery and debt sale, and fraud.
Launched a digital bank and multiple credit businesses from nothing to market, with full P&L ownership and a 2,000-plus person sales organisation built and run beneath him as an executive.
Led State Bank of Vietnam licensing end to end, and has sat across the table from regulators on behalf of the institution.
Runs business development in market himself, including lead-generation and lending partnerships built off third-party customer data.
Designs and deploys the firm’s own AI tooling for credit and risk work, from underwriting pipelines to portfolio reporting.
Track record
Founder and Principal. Build, Protect and Operate for lenders across the region.
Independent Director and Board Risk Chair.
Chief Risk Officer to fintech lending platforms, owning credit, collections and fraud.
Chief Executive Officer. Built digital banking platforms and gave risk advice: the iBank Cambodia mobile banking app and board risk advice, and pre-investment due diligence on Abacus, a Thai digital lender.
Executive Director, Consumer Finance and Digital Banking. Launched the digital bank liobank.vn.
Chief Risk Officer, owning credit policy and the whole of risk operations.
Regional leadership across Vietnam and China.
Swaroop Shah
A lending executive with 28 years across Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and India. He has run lending businesses as CEO and commercial head, and he has also been the Chief Risk Officer. That mix is rare, and it is how Risk Nova works.
Harvard Business School Fintech Executive Programme. Postgraduate degree in Finance, Welingkar Institute of Management, Mumbai.
What he brings
He led Validus Vietnam to the top of Vietnam’s SME lending fintech market. Before that he was on the founding team of Validus Capital, which became Singapore’s largest online SME lending platform.
As Group Chief Commercial Officer at Jenfi, he took a high-burn business to profit. He improved margins and credit losses by more than 45%.
He brought in Visa as a regional B2B lending partner and set up a lending partnership with a global bank in Singapore.
He was Chief Risk Officer at Prudential Vietnam Finance. At CitiFinancial India he ran collections for a USD 4 billion loan book across 450+ branches.
Track record
Group Chief Commercial Officer.
Head of Embedded Finance.
Chief Executive Officer.
Director of Sales, founding team.
Chief Risk Officer of Prudential Vietnam Finance, then Director of Group Internal Audit.
National Collections Head.
Working with us
You work with the people above, not with juniors.
Engagements are deliberately few at a time. If the problem is not one we can move, we will say so in the first conversation rather than scope a study around it.