When Nirbhay Kumar ’97 arrived at Bryant’s campus in 1994, it was something of a culture shock. He and his parents had selected Bryant, sight unseen, from Bombay, India. But the opportunity to earn a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, live near relatives in the Boston area and receive a merit scholarship all prompted the decision. Kumar was surprised to find many international students among his classmates, and recognized several friends from school in India.
He quickly acclimated to campus life and earned his degree in three years by attending winter and summer sessions.
Kumar’s career path stretched his education and skills in ways he never imagined. “As things have changed so dramatically over the last 25 years — primarily due to technology — much of my original career trajectory plans became irrelevant,” he observes.
With two decades of financial technology experience with Thomson Reuters, Openlink Financial, BlackRock, FIS and AlphaPoint, he is now Head of FinTech & Market Data Sourcing with BNY Mellon. There he helps BNY procure the market data, platforms and applications that are core to providing investment services to the Bank’s global client base.
Kumar’s most valuable experience came during his involvement in the founding of crypto-technology trading company AlphaPoint. “I learned more in those 14 months than I did in the previous 18 years,” he recalls. “Working in a start-up forces you to do things you cannot do at large company, where you work in silos.
Everyone does everything in a startup. You see first-hand the connectivity between marketing, product, finance, HR, technology, sales and raising capital. If you can do it early in your career, you see the world as a set of connections and will always think that way going forward.”
Data Science gives students a much broader view of the business world.
In 2019, Kumar joined the Bryant Alumnifire network. He mentors students, was a guest speaker for the Finance Association and Professor Peter Nigro’s 2020 Summer Workshops, participated in the Virtual Walk Down Wall Street and arranged for BNY Mellon to participate in the Global Supply Chain Practicum. Bryant is now also on BNY Mellon’s recruitment list of preferred universities.
He is excited by Bryant’s Data Science program and would like to see an introductory Data Science course become part of the core curriculum.
“Regardless of what students want to do, through data science they see the larger picture,” Kumar explains. “The world is more correlated and different fields are more interdependent than they ever were. Data Science gives students a much broader view of the business world.”
