Inside India’s IPO boom: A conversation with FinPro Consulting

India has become one of the world’s busiest IPO markets, with $22 billion raised last year alone. While going public can unlock capital and growth, it demands extensive preparation across financial reporting, governance, and regulatory compliance. 

Akshay Oke, co-founder of FinPro Consulting, helps companies build the financial reporting foundations needed to go public. Based in Pune, India, his firm specializes in IFRS, Ind AS, and US GAAP advisory services, IPO preparation, and financial reporting automation.

Akshay shared what it takes to get an Indian business IPO-ready, the challenges that catch promoters off guard, and how AI is set to reshape the process. 

Q. How would you describe your firm’s role in IPO preparation?

Our role is to build a strong foundation around a company’s financial reporting framework. When a business goes public, it goes through an extensive review process involving multiple stakeholders – regulators, investors, bankers, and auditors – each playing a vital role in upholding the integrity and credibility of the disclosure framework.  

The financial information that goes into the prospectus, which in India is filed with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and stock exchanges, has to withstand all of it. We make sure those statements are robust and comply with the relevant accounting standards, as well as SEBI’s regulations. 

Beyond the financials, our dedicated IPO advisory division operates as a project management office for the transaction. This division functions independently from our financial reporting and accounting advisory teams, ensuring a clear separation between the two functions. 

Through this structure, we help promoters navigate the IPO journey, orienting them on the process, facilitating introductions to the right investment bankers, legal counsel, and other stakeholders, and ensuring compliance requirements remain aligned throughout.

Q. When a company decides to go public, what are the first things that need to be addressed from a financial reporting perspective? 

One of the first things we focus on is the structure of the group. In many founder-led businesses, the promoter holds equity stakes across several separate companies, so there’s no clear holding company and subsidiary structure. That means the revenue, profitability, and equity are scattered across individual entities. 

We support the promoter in evaluating whether a holding company structure makes sense for the group. Where it does, bringing entities under one umbrella allows the consolidated financials to reflect the true scale of the business.

Five separate companies might not interest a banker, but if those five come together to form a thousand crore (>$100 million) revenue business, it suddenly becomes a compelling proposition.

Q. Where do management teams tend to underestimate the effort involved in IPOs?

The first thing they underestimate is the quality and quantity of data required. A company going public needs a minimum of three full years of restated financial statements in the offer document, and many simply don’t have that historical data readily available. 

Documentation, internal controls, and related party transactions between group companies all come under comprehensive review too, often for the first time. Our role is to bring structure and clarity to the IPO journey; we analyze the data, identify gaps, and ensure every decision is backed by reliable and verifiable inputs. 

The second is the senior management time involved. They have to run the business while dedicating significant hours to the IPO process, because bankers and lawyers won’t direct their questions to junior staff. It falls to the CEO, managing director, or CFO. 

The third is the regulatory groundwork. The companies have to convert from a private limited to a public limited company before filing, and partnership firms which are group companies may have to convert into LLPs. Each step takes time that companies rarely budget for.

Q. You’ve worked extensively on IFRS / Ind AS conversions. How significant is that process for a business preparing to go public?

It’s one of the most significant shifts a company faces. Most businesses that aren’t multinationals and below certain threshold limits follow Indian GAAP (local accounting standards in India), because that’s all they’ve ever been required to do. They aren’t reporting under IFRS / Ind AS, and the moment a company decides to go public, that has to change.

We’ve seen this transition have a major impact on a company’s net worth and profitability, simply because of the change in accounting treatment, so we spend a lot of time educating companies on what to expect. 

The landscape is also constantly evolving. A new standard on the presentation of financial statements, IFRS 18 globally and Ind AS 118 in India, is set to radically alter how statements are presented. Staying ahead of these updates is central to getting the reporting right, and being the partner our clients need.

Q. What’s the most unexpected issue you’ve encountered in IPO preparation, and how did you manage it? 

One situation that comes to mind involved the transition to new lease accounting norms, which required certain assets to be reclassified as finance lease transactions. While the company retained full legal ownership and the underlying security remained intact, the reclassification naturally affected how those assets appeared on the balance sheet.

Since the assets had been financed by a consortium of lenders, the change in presentation had implications for certain financial ratios. This opened up an important dialogue with the banking consortium; one that required us to carefully walk senior officials through the distinction between an accounting reclassification and any change in the actual asset position or security cover.

Securing that shared understanding across a multi-lender group takes time and patience, but it is a necessary step before proceeding with the IPO filing. In this case, once all stakeholders were aligned on the nature of the change, the process moved forward successfully.

Q. What’s been the most memorable transaction you’ve worked on?

The promoter was at the very beginning of his IPO journey. He had a strong business vision, but was naturally unfamiliar with the complexities of the public markets process. Our first role was to orient him with the regulatory landscape, the key milestones, and what institutional investors would expect.

From there, we facilitated introductions to several leading investment banks, allowing the promoter to evaluate and select the right partner for the transaction. On the governance side, we advised on strengthening the statutory and board framework. This included the appointment of appropriately credentialed auditors and the induction of experienced independent directors and a seasoned company secretary. 

Once the team was in place, we worked as an extended arm of the company, coordinating with every agency involved and ensuring the management team was fully prepared for each stage of the investor engagement process. 

What stays with me is the transformation of the business itself – from an early-stage enterprise to a company now positioned to raise substantial capital from public markets. That kind of readiness, built over a few years, reflects the strength of the promoter’s vision as much as the rigor of the process.

Q. More broadly, what do you find most fulfilling about the work? 

What I enjoy most is that listing is never the end, it’s the start. Raising money isn’t just an accounting or financial reporting change, it’s a business transformation. Once a company is listed, it has to demonstrate consistent profits, strong quarter‑on‑quarter results, and deliver sustained business performance to meet the expectations of a larger group of stakeholders.

A lot of our clients stay with us well beyond the IPO, and we continue to support them with the quarterly regulatory reporting required of listed companies. Being part of that long-term journey, and seeing a business mature into a disciplined public company, is the most rewarding part of what I do.

Q. How do you see the process of going public evolving, particularly as AI plays a bigger role? 

AI has changed a lot in just the last six months, and awareness of how to use it has grown considerably. The IPO process in India has traditionally taken a minimum of 9 to 12 months, but I expect AI to shorten that.

For companies, I see three areas of impact. The first is data extraction. A lot of historical information sits in printed or scanned form with nothing editable, and AI can turn those documents into usable, summarized data in hours rather than days.

The second is financial statement preparation. AI assists our teams in structuring and drafting initial frameworks from underlying trial balance data, significantly reducing turnaround time. That said, every output is subject to rigorous professional review, judgment, and validation before anything is presented to auditors, bankers, or regulators. 

The third is drafting. Offer documents of this nature are highly detailed and require precise, consistent language across hundreds of pages. AI tools are beginning to assist teams in managing that complexity more efficiently, accelerating the drafting workflow while experienced legal counsel continues to exercise the professional judgment, regulatory interpretation, and accountability that a document of this significance demands.

As AI capabilities mature, there is potential for greater efficiency across the entire IPO ecosystem, for companies, advisors, and regulators alike. The focus, however, should remain on quality and compliance first. Efficiency gains are a welcome outcome of better preparation, not a substitute for it.