Rajesh Agrawal: How a car loan put me on the road to success

Rajesh Agrawal used his IT skills and foreign exchange nous to set up RationalFX - a website for smaller businesses to make low-cost currency transactions.

In 2001, Rajesh Agrawal was a 23-year-old finance and IT graduate working for a small Indian currency advisory firm. When one of his British clients offered him a job, "I was very excited I'd never left India before". His new employer was a foreign exchange (forex) broker who wanted him to develop its IT systems. "In India, currency exchange is heavily regulated, and you don't have the transaction firms you have here, so it was interesting to see the other side of the business."

Yet after only a few years Agrawal felt restless: "I was doing lots of good work but it was all for someone else." In 2005, he and co-worker Paresh Davdra left to set up their own transaction company, RationalFX.

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James McKeigue

James graduated from Keele University with a BA (Hons) in English literature and history, and has a certificate in journalism from the NCTJ. James has worked as a freelance journalist in various Latin American countries.He also had a spell at ITV, as welll as wring for Television Business International and covering the European equity markets for the Forbes.com London bureau. James has travelled extensively in emerging markets, reporting for international energy magazines such as Oil and Gas Investor, and institutional publications such as the Commonwealth Business Environment Report. He is currently the managing editor of LatAm INVESTOR, the UK's only Latin American finance magazine.