We're pleased to welcome Rajeev (Raj) Marwaha as a Strategic Advisor to Initia Risk.
In short
Rajeev Marwaha joins Initia Risk as a Strategic Advisor. He brings 20+ years in risk across building societies, banking and fintech, including time as a CRO, and is the founder of Dharma Risk.
- Role - Strategic Advisor, focused on lending and regulated financial services.
- Background - practitioner CRO experience across building societies, banks and fintech.
- Why it matters - keeps Initia grounded in what risk leaders in those sectors actually need from the platform.
Initia was built by a practitioner, for practitioners. Raj's background is in lending and regulated financial services - a perspective that sharpens how Initia Risk serves firms across the full spread of regulated sectors, alongside the insurance-side expertise already shaping the product.
Two Decades in Lending and Regulated Financial Services
Raj brings more than 20 years of risk expertise spanning building societies, banking and fintech. That includes time as a Chief Risk Officer - the job of owning the framework, the regulatory relationship, and the board conversation, not just writing the policy pack.
He is the founder of Dharma Risk, where he advises retail lenders, building societies and fintechs on proportionate, commercially grounded risk frameworks. That mix of in-house CRO work and independent advisory is useful for Initia: it is close to both the operating reality inside a regulated firm and the pattern of what goes wrong when tooling is built for a theoretical risk function rather than the one that actually exists.
If you want the career detail in his own words, Raj's profile is on LinkedIn.
What Raj Will Advise On
Raj will advise on the practitioner realities of running a risk function in lending and regulated financial services. That is a different operating environment from a large insurer or a global bank. Lean second lines. First-line owners who already have a day job. Boards that want a residual position they can defend, not a 40-tab workbook.
The questions that matter in that context are practical:
- What does a proportionate RCSA look like in a building society or specialist lender - detailed enough for the PRA and FCA, light enough that the first line will actually complete it?
- How should credit, conduct, operational and financial-crime risk sit together without forcing every firm into a bank-scale taxonomy?
- Where does tooling help, and where does it just add another system the risk team has to feed?
Those are the judgements Initia needs in the product, not just in a sales deck. They are also the judgements financial services firms evaluating a platform will recognise immediately.
Why This Matters for Initia Risk Customers
Most GRC platforms are designed around a generic enterprise risk function. Lending firms are not generic. Affordability, credit decisioning, Consumer Duty, SM&CR and operational resilience all collide in the same framework - and the second line is often a handful of people, not a department.
Raj's lending and regulated financial services lens broadens Initia beyond insurance, alongside the insurance-side expertise already shaping the product. For prospective customers that means the roadmap is being challenged by people who have run the function: what first-line teams will actually use, what a CRO needs to take to the board, and what is noise.
That is the point of a Strategic Advisor at Initia. Not a logo on a slide. A practitioner in the loop, keeping the platform honest. You can meet the wider team on our About page, including fellow Strategic Advisor Rob White.
Welcome to the team, Raj. The announcement on LinkedIn: