Where we create the most value
Not every firm is right for every client, and the honest thing is to say where we are at our best. We work with leaders and owners facing decisions that genuinely matter, where the quality of the thinking changes the outcome, and we focus our experience where it creates the most value for you. So you can assess whether Retinue is a firm which can travel your journey alongside you.
The four kinds of client we serve
Banks and financial institutions
Professionally run and answerable to boards and regulators. They come to us for the strategic and transformational decisions where an independent, senior view matters: a regulatory response, a competitive shift, a technology transformation, the next phase of growth. We bring judgement earned inside institutions like theirs.
IT and Technology companies
Product firms and large technology-enabled companies operating at scale. They come to us when the question is where technology should take the business, or how to deliver complex change without it stalling. We bring the experience of having led large programs through to results, not just advised on them.
Mid-market and family businesses
Promoter-led and family-owned businesses, established and growing, at the point where the approach that built the business is no longer enough for what comes next. They come to us for clarity at an inflection: a new market, a succession, a stalled growth curve, a threat that has exposed a gap, or establishing board practices. We bring the calibre of thinking usually reserved for far larger firms, directly to the founder or owner.
New-age technology and AI companies
Founder-led, funded technology and AI companies that have found product-market fit and now must build the business around the product: go-to-market, scaling, organisation, governance, the decisions that reach the next milestone. They come to us for a senior thinking partner across all of it, at times led by coaching and mentoring. We also work with senior professionals navigating a defining decision of their own.
What travels across every client
Two things travel across every one of these clients. The multi-advisory disciplines we bring, strategy, growth and go-to-market, mergers and acquisitions, governance and finance, apply whatever the sector. And in some, financial services, and technology and IT, we add deep domain experience on top of that judgement. Elsewhere, in other sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, consumer, professional services and education, we lead with the quality of judgement and the method rather than sector-specific depth, and we are clear about the difference.
We are anchored in India, where established mid-market and mid-sized businesses are the core of our work, and we take on international engagements selectively, where our experience and network reach.
Representative engagements
A selection, unnamed for confidentiality, from the founders' institutional careers and from Retinue's own work.
From our founders' institutional careers
- Built and ran an international transaction-banking business.
- Led the business and new-product strategy for a new banking technology platform, built around the future processing needs of financial institutions.
- Led a multi-year transformation program for a global bank across several markets.
- Directed a large systems-integration and technology program for a leading financial institution.
- Led audit engagements and relationship management for foreign and Indian private-sector banks, owning workstreams including treasury (borrowings, investments, money markets, foreign exchange and derivatives) and loans and advances.
- Led a 50-plus accounting operations team, including account ownership, running regional month-end, quarter-end and year-end reporting to US GAAP.
As Retinue
- Business strategy advisory to a new-age technology founder: scaling the business fourfold within three years and, with the advent of AI, building the AI business around their product, from go-to-market to the next raise.
- Multi-discipline business advisory to the founders of a new-age blockchain and crypto company, helping them move from concept to idea to an organisation generating meaningful revenue.
- M&A deal-structuring advisory to the founder of a new-age technology company.
- Early M&A due-diligence advisory to a mid-market promoter on an acquisition approach received from a large international organisation.
- Serving as a senior thinking partner to multiple founders through pivot and scaling decisions.
See how we work across these decisions in Advisory →