Vikram Akula (born 7 November 1968) is an American banker and the founder of SKS Microfinance (now BFIL), a micro finance company and former chairperson of Bharat Financial Inclusion Ltd. SKS was an organization that offered microloans and insurance to poor women in India. He stepped down as SKS Chairperson in November 2011 and became Chairperson Emeritus. Akula is also a founding investor and a Director in AgSri, a sustainable agriculture company focused on helping small sugarcane farmers reduce water use, and a Director in Bodhi Educational Society, which establishes schools for underprivileged children in India. In 2006, he was named by TIME magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world for his work in financial inclusion. Akula currently serves as Chairperson of VAYA Finserv Private Limited. Founded in 2014, the India-based company markets financial services to low-income groups on behalf of partner banks. Early life and education Akula's father, Akula.V. Krishna, was a surgeon who settled in Schenectady, New York, where Akula went to school. Akula graduated from Niskayuna High School in 1986 and enrolled at Tufts University, where he graduated as a double major in philosophy and English with honors in 1990. He went to Yale University for a M.A. in International Relations, and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for an action-research microfinance project in India in 1994–95. He completed his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2004. In 2019-20, he was a Distinguished Career Fellow at Stanford University. Career Upon graduating from Tufts, Akula returned to India for a short while in 1990 and worked with the Deccan Development Society, a small grassroots rural non-profit organization. He then returned to USA and worked for the Worldwatch Institute in Washington D.C. as a researcher, where he wrote articles about poverty and sustainable development. During his Fulbright, Akula returned to the Deccan Development Society, where he helped manage the organization's microfinance program. Akula saw the limitation of non-profit microfinance and proposed a more market-based approach. He outlines his philosophy in his book, A Fistful of Rice; My Unexpected Quest to End Poverty Through Profitability, published by Harvard Business Press in 2010. SKS Microfinance In 1996, Akula completed his Fulbright and went to the University of Chicago to pursue his Ph.D, which he completed in 2004. As a Ph.D. student, he created a business plan for a for-profit microfinance company and in