The Savoir Faire of Impact – Lata Gullapalli: Weaving Capital with Community Resilience 
A tender glow of a busy weekday evening’s soft light fills the London skyline. Lata Gullapalli looks at it through her office window before closing a briefing document on a new financially sustainable ventures in Southeast Asia. For Lata, the world of high finance has never been just about the movement of capital. It is about the movement of possibility.
As the Chairperson of ‘The Savoir Faire Company’ and a seasoned Independent Consultant, she moves with a quiet precision that comes from decades of navigating the complexities of private equity and financial restructuring. Her qualifications include CFA (I), Chartered Secretary, Diploma in Basic Finance, and an MBA in Finance and Strategy from INSEAD, France. Her deep involvement in financially sustainable initiatives for women across multiple regions, her work with the Gandhi Ashram, which operates 300 schools and 26 institutions across India, and her role in the Envoy Circle supporting UN Women reflect her enduring commitment to social impact and inclusive development.
In the boardroom, her voice is the one that asks how a merger or an acquisition will affect the smallest stakeholder. She provides M&A advice that looks beyond the immediate balance sheet to the long-term health of the community. This dual focus is what led her to the Envoy Circle of UN Women UK and her deep involvement with the Harijan Sevak Sangh. “The most successful businesses are those that understand their role in the wider human story,” Lata believes. This belief is so strong that even when she is guiding a corporate restructure or she might be advising a global NGO, her final goal remains anchored: to create a stable foundation for growth that benefits everyone involved.
Her work extends far beyond the glass towers of the city. Lata invests a lot of her time designing mentorship programs for women in rural areas across multiple countries. ‘Economic independence is the first step toward social change,’ she understands, at the same time, working with senior leaders in the corporate world. She helps them develop the emotional intelligence (EI) and a strategic foresight, which is crucial in leading a successful venture in a volatile market. She often says, “A leader who cannot inspire their team is simply a manager holding a mere title.” Her pride comes from seeing a mentee take a bold step into a new market or a rural entrepreneur secure their first round of micro-funding.
Education is another field where her passion for innovative disruption takes center stage. She implements rebuild programs for children and young people in developing countries, viewing education as the ultimate engine for economic impact. A classroom, to Lata, is equally important as that of a trading floor. To ensure these programs are sustainable and life-changing, she uses all her financial expertise and business acumen. Her stern commitment to the future is also reflected in her personal investments. Her complete focus remains on high-growth sectors like financially sustainable ventures. In this field, going beyond just providing capital, she actively and enthusiastically mentors aspiring and talented entrepreneurs on how to face and overcome the challenges of scaling a green business.
In between the action-packed moments of these high-stakes roles, Lata also finds time to pursue her passion for the written word. A successful fiction author and a co-author of a global study on the pandemic, she uses storytelling to learn more about the varied human condition. “My writing allows me to make sense of the vast amounts of data I come across in my professional life and turn it into something emotionally stirring,” She looks at her books as another way to connect with people, offering them a different perspective on resilience and success, along with learning from them herself.
A Career Built on Innovation and Impact
The career of Lata spans investment banking, board leadership, and social impact. Finance and the financial markets, product design, and innovative solutions to market and corporate needs have always fascinated her. Anything to do with sustainable impact with a financial aspect to it has always been her area of keen interest, work experience, and expertise. One thing really led to another. Investment banking and specifically mergers and acquisitions has led to board positions as non-executive director, Chair, and Chair of audit and remuneration committees. There has not been a pivot, but more like she has moved across markets for one reason or another, and so she was at the cutting edge of change and got the opportunity to work on some path-breaking and really innovative solutions, as well as design some brilliant products as well, along the way.
Global Perspective and the Core of Governance
Being in markets as diverse as India, Singapore, Russia, Europe, the UK, and the USA has given her a really broad base of exposure to how markets that are so different from each other, some emerging and some more advanced, work. As a Chairperson and Non-Executive Director, she feels that today governance is the key and the underlying factor of the responsible running of any business. And to be effective in governance, companies have to have clear structures of accountability and responsibility in their everyday working so the way of working is effective on an ongoing basis, rather than something they need to search for in case of problems.
The Intertwined World of Corporate and Social Value
The world is becoming so very intertwined as well as collaborative, with huge overlaps to the extent of blurred lines between corporate and not-for-profit enterprises, which has changed the way they think, work, and operate their businesses going into the future. The fact of today’s corporate world is that the concept of the shareholder being the one master the company management serves has expanded to include stakeholders who comprise customers, suppliers, employees, as well as society at large. This puts added need on companies to have the governance lines clearly drawn and adhered to.
Redefining Capital and Project Assessment in 2026
When it comes to the current trends redefining capital in 2026, she feels that there has always been more than sufficient capital in the world, and it is available too. But to access it, increasing emphasis is not only on the next best idea, but also on how it will impact the sector, the geography the company is in, but also the economy and the world at large, especially in terms of social impact, such as jobs, salaries, and living standards. She believes we have to take all these factors into account when we assess the feasibility of a project. While the projects that they take forward are important, no doubt, but in her view, equally important are the projects that they decide not to take forward, even when the numbers add up.
The Logic of Purpose-Driven Entrepreneurship
Also, when it comes to balancing commercial success with purpose-driven initiatives, especially in sectors like financially sustainable ventures and social development, as she said before, all projects have to be assessed with the multiple viewpoints of how it affects societies and renewable and other resources. For her, it was a simple and logical move to look at entrepreneurship development. She saw that it was not being run the way it should, so she began with a pilot project to see if she could transfer her learnings from her investment banking and mergers and acquisitions experience to run these projects for sustainable development and financial independence for women in rural areas. It worked, and she received several awards for this type of project and now runs similar projects in several places.
Empowering Women and Breaking Barriers
The learning is the same. Lata believes we have to focus on the people as much as on the financials. The numbers have to make sense, yes, but the people working on the projects, as well as those who will be affected by them, have all to be considered. Also, while working in women mentoring, what she calls barriers are not special for rural areas. She believes we have as many barriers in corporate or urban settings as well. The urgency is to build awareness that what she and her team are trying to do is to simply mentor and help support women to engage in their traditional craft or in a business idea to achieve financial independence. That supports their family income and only uses their spare time, so there is no taking away from the rest of their responsibilities or lives. That’s why she is talking a lot about it at summits and conferences, and she has even recently recorded a TEDx talk about it.
Collaborative Leadership and the Definition of Profit
Awareness will make it easier for people like her and others who run similar projects to run them, as well as bring people who are interested in supporting such work to them, so they can collaborate. She sees that the world has clearly moved to a collaborative world where we work together to bring sustainable change to wherever we are and whatever we choose to work on. Some simple leadership principles guide her in decision-making when operating across corporate and NGO ecosystems. To lead is, for her, to lead from the front, meaning to take the responsibility for the consequences of the actions they take as a company or organization.
The principles are the same whether she works in corporate or what is called not-for-profit. She chooses to define not-for-profit as charitable or not for profit for her, but it has to be for profit for the people receiving the mentorship and setting up the businesses. They have to be focused on making a profit and also on being sustainable in the long term as well. The only difference, if it is one, is that the not-for-profit ventures can choose what to do with their profits, or even define profit in their own way. But then again, so do corporates, isn’t it?
The Investment Mandate: Sustainable Impact
Furthermore, being in investment banking and especially in mergers and acquisitions for about 30 years, she has learned that she must invest for impact, and not only impact, but sustainable impact. If these are not possible, she would not invest her time, support, or money.
The Culture of Capability and Professionalism
While leading initiatives across multiple countries, Lata realized anew that culture is part of us since the time we are born and shapes us as we grow up. She believes we have a view of the world shaped, influenced, and sometimes even controlled by those around us. As they make their way in their jobs, they take on new learnings and sometimes leave some of the old ones that were not well-founded behind. The only guiding principle that she has learned working across so many and such different cultures is that one doesn’t need to wear one’s culture on one’s sleeve. The only culture, if she can call it that, that they need to have uppermost, is the culture of capability and professionalism, in addition to being sensitive to the local customs and traditions of where they are, as empathetic human beings.
Innovation as a Tool for Sustainable Disruption
She ardently believes that innovation plays a crucial role in creating long-term social and economic impact, particularly in developing regions. She has been a born disruptor, she thinks, in the sense that she has always gone into a job, project, or setting and looked to see how she can make things happen, firstly, and then make them happen to create long-term impact. So she is always looking to disrupt and positively so they have a long-term and sustainable impact. This means constantly innovating and thinking about, around, and outside the box, if that is the right way to describe it. That’s the only way they can bring change to communities and societies and thereby to economies and countries.
The Interconnected Future of Global Collaboration
Looking ahead, especially, in emerging opportunities she is very excited to participate in collaborations across countries, and geographies which were earlier, a little hesitant, perhaps, to have these conversations. She is especially enthused to see the crossovers and overlaps between corporate investment proposals and building sustainable societies alongside. It seems the world has suddenly become so much bigger and so much more interconnected. Projects that were earlier strictly reserved for governments, corporates, or NGOs are now open to people like her and organizations like hers, which work across. Increased awareness will help easier with funding flows as well.
Advising the Next Generation: The Art of Thinking
Finally, when it comes to advising the next generation, she wouldn’t differentiate between men and women in aspiring to create and influence societies – of course, there are more men than women in almost every area, but the number of women is growing well. She says this because she teaches a course called “How to Think” to senior bankers, senior leaders, women in business, entrepreneurs, and also to university students. She designed the course based on her work experience across markets and uses mini case studies of the situations she has worked in to guide thinking on how one needs to think.
What one thinks is situational, and she believes that when they know how to, they will make the right decisions. She sees that the thinking is pretty much the same, in that everyone is keen to create a better business and society without a doubt. The focus needs to be on ability and not on special status, either given historically or on criteria that are not based on professional capability.