Koustubh Sharma is a refined Risk and Business Intelligence Analyst working at National Funding, part of FairSquare Holdings, which operates five lending brands including National Funding, Quick Bridge, and Finova.
What started with National Funding, founded in 1999, has provided over $6 billion in funding to American small businesses and appeared on the Inc. 5000 list multiple years. At a company of this scale, risk analytics, portfolio surveillance, forecasting, and regulatory reporting would typically require a dozen specialists.
Sharma designed and built the entire infrastructure himself owning originations KPIs across all five brands and maintaining loss and delinquency surveillance on a portfolio exceeding $275 million.
His original contributions include a cumulative lag-based conversion curve model that replaced the industry-standard linear pacing method, improving forecast reliability enough that leadership adjusted lending capacity based on its output.
He designed an early payoff detection system, credit history driven segmentation systems, uncovered systematic misreporting in write-off reconciliation, triggering a permanent process overhaul across Risk and Finance. He authored the BI Governance Framework the rest of the team follows, and produces data underlying multi-state regulatory filings submitted to government agencies.
Sharma has published peer-reviewed research in IEEE conference proceedings, accumulating over dozens of citations. He is writing Risk at Machine Speed, a book on credit risk in automated lending.
A Senior Audit Officer at India’s Comptroller and Auditor General, with five decades of service, reviewed his work: “What is unusual is the depth at which he engages with his own methods and with broader industry practices — not just applying techniques, but interrogating their assumptions and documenting their limitations. In my experience, that level of critical self-examination typically comes after fifteen or twenty years of practice. Sharma appears to have arrived there considerably faster, and the fact that he does this inside a fast-paced private lender rather than in an academic or regulatory setting makes it all the more uncommon.”
In March 2026, Republic World quoted Sharma alongside professors and insurance executives on maritime war-risk insurance — the only SMB lending analyst cited — where his commentary connected the disruption to small business credit exposure.
Sharma holds an MS in Business Analytics from UC Irvine and an MBA from NMIMS Mumbai. He grew up near Bhopal in central India.
