I was recently joined by Chintan Panchal, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at RPCK Rastegar Panchal, to discuss how Chintan entered the impact investing space. We also broke down how RPCK Rastegar Panchal is tailoring innovative solutions as an international boutique law firm.
Jeff Gitterman: Hi, and good morning. Welcome to the Impact on FinTech TV. I’m your host, Jeff Gitterman. I’m joined this morning by Chintan Panchal, co-founder and managing partner at RPCK Rastegar Panchal, LLC. Chintan, great to have you here today.
Chintan Panchal: Great to be here, Jeff. Great to see you.
Gitterman: So just in case our audience doesn’t know it, we are good friends, and I’ve known you for a couple of years now, at least, and you do great work out in the impact space. We like to start the show by asking people why impact, why not a traditional law career?
Panchal: Sure.
Gitterman: And what led you here and a little bit about your role?
Panchal: Yeah, sounds great. Sounds great. It’s a great question and it’s a personal question to everyone in this space, and then there’s commonalities among all of us. So for me, I had a traditional career in the traditional law space, which was a fantastic place to be, and it’s cool to do complicated, interesting stuff and get paid reasonably well to do it.
But there comes a time in life, I think, for many of us, where you realize that you’re meant to try to do something more and to make a difference in a more meaningful way. I think that’s one of the things that’s drawn a lot of people to this community and and this line of work. For me, my background, the tool set that I am the most familiar with is that of being a lawyer, of being a creative thinker, problem solver. I understand financial markets, I understand the tools, and if I could bring that type of perspective and work to this kind of more purpose-driven space, it’s kind of the perfect outcome for many of us. So for me, that’s what I’ve been working at building.
Gitterman: So talk to me a little bit about what your firm specializes in before we get into the meat of lots of things that we want to talk about today.
Panchal: Yeah, absolutely. So I think of RPCK as a specialized law firm that’s focused on creative problem solving for challenges that matter, especially ones that are a worldwide scale. And so we will bring a lot of the traditional tools of private equity, corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, global banking, regulatory understanding, tax litigation, you name it.
Gitterman: Okay. So talk to me a little bit more about what exactly your firm does. What is your focus of companies that you work with within the space? I think it’s mostly private versus public. Give me a little insight to your day to day.
Panchal: Absolutely. So we kind of work with three general categories of folks. Asset owners, so family offices, foundations, development finance agencies, sovereign wealth funds and the like. We work with managers and sponsors, so fund managers across a very wide array of strategies. And folks that are leading enterprises, typically small and medium sized enterprises, SMEs.
So the common thread among all of those folks is that they have a commercial approach, whether it’s investing or products and services or capital aggregation or what have you. They have an investing and business building approach that is focused on solving challenges that are global scale, that are human scale challenges, things that matter to a lot of people and have the potential to make people’s lives better. And these folks recognize that you can build a great company, you can build a great investment portfolio that has that element at its core.
To catch the full conversation, you can watch my interview with Chintan Panchal.
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