They came, they saw, they compounded: The Motilal Oswal story

IN THE LATE ’80s, a young chartered accountant (CA) from Rajasthan would stand at the Four Bungalows bus stop in Andheri, a Mumbai suburb, every morning, waiting for a connecting bus to take him the last leg home to Lokhandwala. On most days, a Hero Honda motorcycle would pull up alongside, ridden by another young man who happened to be heading in the same direction. “I used to get down at Four Bungalows, and just by coincidence Raamdeo would be coming from there on his bike. He used to park it at Andheri station,” recalls Motilal Oswal, sitting at the company’s headquarters. “I started waiting for the bus, but really, I started waiting for the lift! Then one day we got talking, only to discover that not only we had a common profession, we also came from the same hostel... Something just clicked,” Oswal tells Fortune India.

That two-wheeler, that bus stop, and the coincidence of two CA students from the same Rajasthan hostel (run by RVG Educational Foundation) in Andheri, ending up in the same neighbourhood, is what is today Motilal Oswal Financial Services Ltd (MOFSL): an integrated financial powerhouse, valued at over ₹51,000 crore.