Opening the world of finance for all

Working in the field of finance was not on Pramita Saha’s radar growing up.

“Nobody in my family knew anything about high finance,” Saha says. Born in Long Island, New York, and raised in India, she came back to the U.S. to attend Smith College, where she immersed herself in computer science and economics.

When the banks came to campus to recruit, she landed an internship and later joined Goldman Sachs.

Even with mentors at the firm, she felt a step behind colleagues who had grown up with deep industry connections or finance degrees. “I was smart enough to get the job, but once I got there, I realized how much more I had to learn,” says Saha, who went on to earn her MBA at the Wharton School to fill those gaps.

Today, Saha is making it easier for others to understand and join the traditionally enigmatic sector as a professor of the practice of finance and executive director of the Center for Excellence in Investment Management at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.

Saha joined UNC Kenan-Flagler after more than 15 years in capital markets, including head of loan syndicate and distribution for the Americas at Standard Chartered and senior roles at Citigroup and BBVA. Throughout her career, she gravitated toward coaching and developing younger colleagues, helping them navigate the world she once found opaque.

After life in New York City with two young children became untenable, family brought her to the Triangle. She stepped away from finance for a time, but then UNC Kenan-Flagler offered her the opportunity to shape how a new generation enters finance.

Making finance accessible

She joined the Business School as the finance career coach for the Full-Time MBA Program, which put her directly into the work she cares about most. She moved into leading student and alumni engagement at the Center for Excellence in Investment Management and eventually into her current role as executive director, where she shapes the center’s strategy, expands industry partnerships and drives the long-range vision for investment management education.

“My passion is making finance accessible to students from all backgrounds,” she says. “Finance can be very intimidating. It’s like learning a new language.”

For students on the outside, that language gets in the way early and often keeps them out. Many only see a narrow slice of the industry, like investment banking, and miss other areas. Others give up on trying to break in.

Saha’s response: Build pathways in.

She focuses on experiential offerings in her teaching. She developed the Projects in Investment Management Experiential Learning (PRIME) class which reaches students across the Full-Time MBA, Undergraduate Business Program and Master of Accounting Program.

She also created — and teaches — the Gateway into Capital Markets and Investments course to for undergraduate students, and she developed a core course for Master of Science in Management (MSM) Program students.

Spanning the full investment landscape

The 2026-2027 academic year marks the center’s five-year anniversary. Its growth reflects the demand its founders saw from the start.

What began as a focused effort to connect students with industry has grown into a platform for reimagining who finance is for and who gets to shape it.

Today, it serves students across all degree programs and spans the full investing landscape — from public markets to private capital, direct investing to capital allocation, private wealth management to quantitative strategies, across institutional capital and individual investors.

Students benefit from a robust network of industry partners across the U.S. The center connects them with industry through teaching, competitions, conferences, networking and research — preparing them not just to understand the field but also to lead it.

A signature event is the Alpha Challenge, the pre-eminent investment pitch competition for MBA students. Under Saha’s leadership, the center also launched the UG Alpha Competition in 2023 to give undergraduate students direct, hands-on experience in all realms of investing. Interest has grown from 30 students in the first year to 250 in 2026 representing primarily UNC first-years students and sophomores who haven’t taken a business class.

The Investment Management for All: Wealth & Women conference brings together students from over 50 universities to focus on breaking down barriers and making the industry more accessible to historically marginalized groups. Around half come from outside UNC, reflecting what Saha sees as a wider demand for access.

Firms that sponsor the center’s events don’t write just checks. They come to recruit the best and brightest students at UNC Kenan-Flagler, who have gone on to roles across the full spectrum of the industry, from the largest institutional asset managers to leading boutique firms.

Saha manages an advisory board of leading investment professionals and a council of more than 70 members — primarily alumni — guide the center. They are deeply invested in students’ long-term career success. And to build a community that keeps practitioners and students in ongoing conversations, she launched the Investment Management Action Council.

Prepared for change

“We’re exposing students to the breadth of the industry,” she says, “not just one track.”

That matters more as finance changes. Some areas are shrinking while others are growing quickly. Private capital is now a major part, passive investing has upended markets, and data and AI are starting to change how decisions are made.

“The change is constant,” she says.

Saha’s message for students is that knowing finance is not enough: You need to handle data and use it to make decisions others miss.

“In the past, you could be an expert in one silo,” Saha says. “Now, you need a much more integrated view.”

AI is part of that shift. Used well, it can accelerate learning, surface patterns humans might miss and open new sources of insight. Used poorly, it becomes a crutch that erodes the very judgment it is meant to sharpen.

But for Saha, the rise of AI makes the human element more important, not less. Relationships, integrity, accountability, sound judgment and the ability to communicate clearly and earn trust are not soft extras. They are what separate good investors from great ones and no algorithm can replace them.

Even as the tools change, some things do not. Finance, she says, is still a field for people who are curious, keep learning and think for themselves.

“At the end of the day, managing money has a lot of power. It can have tremendous impact,” Saha says.