From a digital-payments research project to a bank audit internship: Krinjal Khabiya’s MBA FinTech journey at Parul University!

Krinjal Khabiya is pursuing an MBA with a specialisation in FinTech at Parul University, and the specialisation is not an afterthought in how she introduces herself. She leads with it, because it is the point her whole education has been moving toward. She is from Tehsil Kushalgarh in Rajasthan, and she describes herself in one line.

I am passionate about finance, fintech, and financial technology.

The coherence of her profile is that she has not come from outside to FinTech. She earned her B. from Albertus State College. Before joining the MBA, she has completed her Com Honors in Parul University and was content with the teaching in the university and the particular course, which is why she selected the specialisation. All of the steps follow each other.

The choice to keep attending the same school was based on her own experiences of it, not on ranking or external counsel. She attended the undergrad program there, witnessed the way courses were taught and designed, and decided that it was enough to join the master’s-level program. It has an even more specific origin in the specialisation. During her B.Com has done a research project on a digital payment system, and her study priorities have changed during her process of working on it. As the volume of payment activity shifted from traditional methods to digital, the interest in finance going digital became much broader, and FinTech was the obvious choice. The two alternatives fit together nicely: she remained at the university because her training had been rewarding to her, and she selected the field because her own research had led her there.

The most concrete part of Krinjal’s profile is the internship she completed as a co-auditor, working at Indian Bank through an audit engagement. It put her inside a working bank rather than a classroom, and the work was documentary and numerical in equal measure.

Both sides of the work reward accuracy and punish carelessness, and she counted them as part of her regular responsibilities rather than one-off exposure.

There is an honest link between this work and her chosen field, and it is worth stating plainly without overreaching it. Her passion for FinTech started when she studied a digital payment system and the digitalisation of finance. Traditional banks are the ones that are being transformed by digitisation, including loan records, deposits, and cash handling.

From the very beginning, she had been working with paper loan files, which she knew were being replaced by digital lending; with fixed deposit records that she used to handle and which are now being pulled by account aggregators and instant-KYC systems; and with the money in the ATM/branch that she used to deal with and which is now being replaced by the UPI and digital payment flows that called her into the field in the first place. A student who has dealt with the manual version knows more about what the digital system is really replacing than a book can convey. The two parts of her profile, academic and digital, as well as practical and conventional, complement each other perfectly.

Krinjal’s placement preparation ran through the university’s training, and she describes it in two connected stages. The first was a 45-day internship training program. What she loved best about it was that the trainer did not correct students in front of the class but went to each student individually and demonstrated to him/her where he/she had been incorrect. The training focused on doing, not listening, and the activities involved a series of projects and data sets. She comes back to the word shaping more than once and explains how that repeated practice worked on her abilities—how she was slowly formed, not how she came this way as a result of a short event that ended with hours.

The second stage came after the internship training, a post-training phase aimed at the selection rounds themselves. Here, the students were prepared for personal interviews, group discussions, and similar activities, the parts of placement where a candidate has to present themselves rather than do a project. In her own assessment, it helped her shape herself for those rounds. Alongside the formal training, she has also taken part in various competitions during the MBA; she did not name them or cite results, so there is nothing to record beyond the fact of her participation, which fits the picture of a student building a profile actively while still early in the program. If you’re interested in finance and technology, save your spot for an MBA in FinTech, and get to work for your dream fintech company!

→  For how the Mavericks program works and how students are selected, see the Mavericks overview in Related Insights.

Krinjal is one of the students recognised as a Maverick at Parul University, the title the university gives to a group drawn from the top of the batch. What her account adds up to is a student with a single, consistent line of interest and a genuine piece of workplace experience to stand on. She is passionate about financial technology; she came to it through her own research rather than by default, and she has already spent time inside a bank doing the kind of careful records-and-cash work that a finance career is built on. She describes herself as still eagerly learning about the business world, which is the right posture for where she is: early in the journey, clear about the direction, and building the profile deliberately.

SOURCE AND CONTEXT.  Based on an interview with Krinjal Khabiya, MBA FinTech, Parul University, reported by Janvi Singh. Her B.Com Honours, the digital-payments research project, the Indian Bank co-auditor internship, and the training programs are as she described them. The source recorded the internship as being ‘under Manish Mehta, company’; the audit firm’s exact name should be confirmed before it is published, and it is referred to here only as an audit engagement. No placement package is claimed. Her LinkedIn link has had tracking parameters removed; the Indian Bank link is to the bank’s official site.

• Krinjal Khabiya, MBA FinTech student, Parul University; recognised as a Maverick
• Indian Bank, a public sector bank; host of her co-auditor internship