Fascinated by Finance

Asha Joshi (M.A. ’81, ’85) arrived at UCLA as a graduate student in psychology rather than business. But soon she grew frustrated with what she saw was a future of writing papers no one would read. Instead of completing her doctorate, she finished with a master’s degree and pivoted to something that felt more practical and aligned with her personality: b-school.

Joshi didn’t ditch psychology completely, though. Throughout her career, she has brought to the table her personal philosophy that there are always people behind the numbers — and they are a critical piece of the equation.

At UCLA’s Graduate School of Management or “GSM,” as Anderson was still known at the time, Joshi considered pursuing marketing, which had some overlap with her psych background. However, craving something new, she set her sights instead on finance, a field about which she knew next to nothing.

“I didn’t know the difference between a stock and a bond, I’m embarrassed to say now,” Joshi says. “But I was quite fascinated by finance and its incredibly important role in the world.”

Today, she knows a thing or two more, to say the least.

At UCLA, Joshi quickly learned the ropes of finance, studying under professors like Robert Geske and Richard Roll. Despite the conventional wisdom that “grades don’t matter” at business school, Joshi studied hard and earned high marks — which she credits for landing her her first job in derivatives trading at First Interstate Bank Ltd. (later acquired by Standard Chartered Bank).

This experience would introduce her to an entirely new world yet again: a locker-room culture, where, for example, a male colleague thought it was all right to share lewd photos of himself.

“It was completely male-dominated, and it was quite an adjustment for me, an immigrant woman,” Joshi says. “I just learned to bob and weave on the trading floor, and it toughened me up. I kept my focus on the work but wasn’t afraid to speak up when necessary.” Joshi also believed she lost out on some opportunities when bosses assumed she wouldn’t come back to work if she got pregnant, or that she wouldn’t want to travel as part of her job. She was actually told she didn’t need as big a bonus as her colleagues because her husband worked, too.

When Joshi was pregnant, she went to HR to ask about the company’s maternity leave policy. It didn’t have one. “I went to my boss and I said, ‘Wow, there’s no maternity leave policy in this company,’” Joshi recalled. “And he said, ‘What? You want to get paid without working?’”

Despite these challenges, Joshi says her time on the trading floor was a fantastic learning experience. After seven years with First Interstate, she spent a couple of years as vice president of capital markets at CIBC Wood Gundy.

And then, for nearly 30 years after that, Joshi has worked on the buy side of finance at the Los Angeles-based global investment firm Payden & Rygel. As a managing director, she and her team work with clients that include public plans, corporations, universities and endowments to advise them on investment solutions and to quarterback the management of their investments at the firm.

Today, Joshi marvels at how much has changed since she started her career. The locker room culture is no longer pervasive. And paternity leave exists alongside maternity leave — a cultural shift she views as crucial for gender equality in the workplace.

In one of her first classes at UCLA in business strategy, Joshi remembers the professor asking the class what the purpose of a company was. Some people said it was to make the best product or to provide a service that satisfies the customer. Others said the purpose was to innovate. The real answer, the professor said, was to maximize shareholder value, or wealth.

“That was such an alien concept for me,” Joshi says. “It’s nothing about doing good for society — not even a pretense. Although I understand that logic now, that initial impression stuck with me.”

Joshi (center) with Center for Impact’s Tereza Omabuwa and Professor Magali Delmas

Later, during her time on the trading floor at First Interstate, Joshi encountered a money market economist who remarked that the standard of living in South Africa would fall if apartheid — then still the government-sanctioned system of racial segregation in place in that country — ended. Joshi was horrified at the economist’s exclusive focus on numbers, which ignored the injustice and suffering of the majority of the people in that country. While she understood the cool, calculated logic on a technical level, given her finance education at UCLA, she could not let go of the thought that something was missing from the analysis.

At Payden & Rygel, Joshi found an example of what it could look like to bridge the gap between maximizing shareholder value and giving back to society. Joan Payden, president, CEO and founder of the firm, has encouraged her and her colleagues to volunteer on boards or at nonprofits and be generous with their time and money. Payden herself serves on many boards, including the advisory board of the UCLA Anderson Fink Center for Finance.

“I think she’s extraordinary,” Joshi says of Payden, “because she understands that it’s not just about numbers. I think she understands that at a very instinctive level. Her mantra is ‘passion and commitment,’ and she definitely has those.”

These days, Joshi, too, spends some of her time outside of work on the advisory board of UCLA Anderson’s Center for Impact. Through her work there, she hopes students will learn not just how to make a good business, but also what the impact of that business will be on people and the climate.

Among the initiatives at the Center for Impact is the Open For Good project, a platform that aggregates publicly disclosed corporate sustainability information on the companies in the S&P 500 Index to help create a corporate transparency index by which companies are measured across environmental, social and governance topics.

Students can also get involved in “impact investing,” where they form committees and are given money to invest in companies that are achieving a positive social impact while earning an acceptable return. Joshi has been delighted to see high interest in these endeavors from all kinds of students.

“When I was in business school, there was a bifurcation,” she says. “There were the people doing finance, usually very alpha men, and then there were (mostly women) wanting to do nonprofit work. The gap between doing well and doing good always bothered me. We should not have to think about charitable/nonprofit work as the only way to do good. I am so glad to see the growing awareness and education about the impact of our profitable ventures. Now, at UCLA, we’re training future leaders to factor in the people behind the numbers. It’s a heck of a way to change the world.”