Crest Ventures is a three-decade-old Indian group that builds businesses by putting its own capital to work, then using the cash those businesses generate to fund the next one - an approach that has carried it from financial-market trading floors into Mumbai’s luxury real-estate market. It began in 1982 and spent its early decades in financial services, often through joint ventures with global firms, before a landmark ₹936-crore mall exit in 2022 gave it the firepower to pivot aggressively into property development. Today the company operates as a Reserve Bank of India-registered middle-layer NBFC, and everything it does - lending, broking, investing, building - is connected by a single discipline: it supplies capital to projects it understands, often stepping in to manage them directly when that improves the outcome. # Business segments Four engines at different stages - a wholesale-markets broking franchise, a structured-credit and equity-investing book, and a premium real-estate development pipeline - each built with the cash flows of the one before. ## 1. Financial services: the group’s market-facing cash engine **A 25-year-old inter-dealer broking desk sits at the centre of India’s wholesale bond and currency markets, earning a fee on every trade without taking principal risk.** - **Voice broker to the biggest players** - the desk intermediates trades in government securities, corporate bonds, foreign exchange, and interest-rate derivatives for clients that include the world’s largest banks, sovereigns, mutual funds, and corporate treasuries. It describes its position as market leadership in the OTC (over-the-counter) broking space. - **Paid when the deal is struck** - brokerage on forward foreign-exchange contracts is booked on the day the trade is agreed, not when the contract settles, so income arrives ahead of the underlying cash flows. The corporate-bond desk alone grew revenue by 25% in a year, helped by higher secondary-market turnover and more primary commercial-paper issuance. - **A new desk inside the tax-free zone** - in April 2025 the group set up a step-down subsidiary in GIFT City, Gujarat’s international financial services centre, to offer voice broking under the IFSCA’s ancillary framework, giving it a regulated base to serve offshore clients. - **Demerger in motion** - the board has approved a scheme to spin off the entire financial-services business into the listed subsidiary Crest Capital and Investment Limited, with shareholders receiving one new CCIL share for every two Crest Ventures shares they hold, a move designed to give each business a focused balance sheet and its own stock-market currency. ## 2. Investments and credit: the capital-allocation engine **The group uses its own NBFC balance sheet to lend against real-estate projects and take equity stakes in a handful of operating companies, earning interest and long-term capital gains.** - **Lending where it builds** - the structured-credit book is tied directly to the company’s real-estate practice: it lends to the very projects it is developing in partnership, which has unlocked sites in Mumbai’s most sought-after micro-markets. The focus is on last-mile completion finance and redevelopment opportunities that already have regulatory clearances, with security cover and defined exit timelines built in from the start. - **Interest priced with a floor** - short-term inter-corporate deposits to related parties carry a rate set at the company’s base rate plus a credit spread of at least 200 basis points, so the return automatically adjusts when benchmark rates move. - **Equity bets on operating businesses** - the portfolio includes a stake of more than 15% in TBOF Foods, a direct-to-consumer organic-food company that sells over 50 products across India and exports to 52 countries, best known for its A2-milk cultured ghee, and which closed a Series A round in FY25. It also holds more than 23% of Tamarind Global Services, a destination and event-management firm whose four verticals - tours, MICE, events, and online - returned to pre-Covid scale in FY25 on the back of inbound travel and corporate events. - **Exit discipline** - the company previously held a 5.12% stake in listed EPC and real-estate firm Vascon Engineers and sold most of it during FY24 for what it calls significant returns; it also exited a 10% stake in IT-infrastructure specialist CMS IT Services during FY23. ## 3. Real estate: the asset-building engine **The group develops premium and luxury residential and commercial projects in Mumbai, Chennai, Raipur, and Jaipur, using an asset-light model that favours joint development, redevelopment, and fee-based management over outright land purchase.** - **Other people’s land, the group’s expertise** - under a typical joint-development agreement, the landowner contributes the plot and Crest Ventures undertakes the construction, design, and sales, transferring an agreed share of the built-up area or revenue in return. The in-house team handles architecture, execution, finance, and sales, which lets the company control quality and cash flows without tying up capital in large land banks. - **Commercial property that pays rent** - in Chennai, the group holds a 50% stake in an SPV that developed One National Park, a Grade-A office building in Velachery with more than 600,000 square feet of leasable area, built in partnership with The Phoenix Mills Limited and expected to begin contributing annuity income once the occupancy certificate is received. The same partnership previously built the Phoenix MarketCity mall in Chennai, and the group successfully monetized a part of that mixed-use development. - **Revenue recognised as the work is done** - the company books real-estate revenue over time using a cost-based input method, meaning it recognises income in proportion to the actual project cost incurred against the total estimated cost, rather than waiting for a completion certificate. # Group structure and partners **The group is a holding company with a web of wholly owned project SPVs underneath it, a listed subsidiary on the way, and a history of partnering with industry leaders to build assets.** - Crest Ventures Limited sits at the top as the listed NBFC holding company, with Fine Estates Private Limited as its own holding entity. Across the group, including all subsidiaries, there were 159 employees as of March 2025. - The financial-services arm, Crest Finserv Limited, is a wholly owned material subsidiary that has run the fixed-income and currency-derivatives OTC desk for over 25 years; its key executive, Sheetal Kapadia, has led the business since 2002. The planned demerger will carve this business into Crest Capital and Investment Limited, which is proposed to be listed on both the BSE and NSE. - On the real-estate side, the group creates a separate SPV for nearly every project. Sutlej Housing Private Limited was acquired in April 2025 as the vehicle for the Dadar cluster-redevelopment scheme; Crest Urban Living Private Limited signed the joint-development agreement for the Chembur mixed-use project; and Crest EZY Living Private Limited was incorporated in February 2026 to pursue build-to-rent, co-living, and student housing. - The defining partnership was with The Phoenix Mills Limited: together they built the Phoenix MarketCity mall in Chennai and the One National Park office tower, and in May 2022 Crest sold its entire 50% stake in the mall-holding company to Phoenix Mills for ₹936 crore, a transaction that reshaped the group’s balance sheet and funded its subsequent push into Mumbai real estate.