She was the first Bangladeshi woman on Wall Street and built one of the early stock exchanges for social enterprises in the world. The founder of Singapore's Impact Investment Exchange talks about her new book and lessons India can take from her career about measuring social impact in financial markets
Durreen Shahnaz calls herself a defiant optimist.
Defiance and optimism are not two words one would think about putting together, in the same way that one would never really think about taking on traditional financial systems and making them work for the 99 percent people instead of the one percent wealthy. But that’s exactly what Shahnaz, founder and CEO of Singapore’s Impact Investment Exchange, went about doing in her life. She had the stubborn belief that systems that enrich the few can be transformed for the good of the many. “Defiant is something that goes against the status quo, but there’s also a lot of courage. And optimism is when you know you are doing something that is beyond just for yourself. It’s your North Star, in a way, to make the world more inclusive,” she says, in an interaction on Forbes India's From the Bookshelves podcast.