Goutam Chand
Nahar
Founder and Chairman · until 2018
He started the business before it was a company, and ran it for the rest of his life from the same building.
[Photograph of Goutam Chand Nahar, if the family is comfortable publishing one.]
He began with vehicles
Automobile finance was the first line, and it was a deliberate choice, it reached more people than anything else available to a lender in Chennai at the time. Lorries, cars, commercial vehicles: assets you could see, value and, if it came to it, find.
From that base he widened the company one line at a time. Property. Corporate lending. Gold. Film. Micro-finance. None of it arrived as a strategy document; each line was added because someone he already knew asked him for it.
What he was careful about
The company he left behind has no charge registered against its assets and carries very little debt. That is not an accident of one good year, it is thirty years of a particular temperament, which is that you should only lend money you can afford to have out.
[A line he used to say about lending, if the family remembers one. This is the single most valuable sentence that could go on this page.]
1995
He formalised the business as Heeraa Financial Services Limited on 24 April 1995, registered with the Registrar of Companies in Chennai, and later with the Reserve Bank of India as a non-banking financial company.
[Why he decided to incorporate when he did, to be supplied.]
What came after
Goutam Chand Nahar was Chairman until his death in 2018. His son, Praveen Chand Nahar, leads Heeraa Financial Services today, from the same building on the same street, on the same terms.