Hi, I’m Prateek

I moved to the UK from India in 2011 for a software career. Like most Indians who make that move, I arrived with a decent grasp of Indian finance — mutual funds, FDs, insurance-disguised-as-investment — and almost zero understanding of how the UK system worked, or how the two systems interacted with each other.

The hard lessons came quickly. Nobody explained the ISA. Nobody warned me that Indian mutual fund gains could trigger a UK tax liability without the right structuring. Nobody talked about what currency depreciation quietly does to returns over a decade of sending money back home. I had to work it all out myself — through a lot of reading, a few expensive mistakes, and eventually, a genuine obsession with cross-border personal finance.

Fifteen years in, I’m a 360° global investor — across UK and US stocks, ETFs, Indian equities, mutual funds, crypto, and fixed income. In 2025, as the UK introduced global taxation changes that fundamentally shifted the calculus for NRI investors, I made the decision to exit all Indian mutual funds and restructure my portfolio entirely from a UK base. That decision — and the reasoning behind it — is exactly the kind of thing Pound & Paisa covers.

There is no shortage of UK personal finance content. There is also no shortage of Indian finance content made in India. What almost doesn’t exist is content built specifically for Indians living in the UK — people who have to think about ISA allowances and LTCG in the same breath, who wonder whether to keep investing in India or restructure entirely for the UK, who send money home every month and want to know which provider is actually cheapest once you factor in the hidden FX markup.

That’s the gap this site fills. The tools, the articles, the numbers — all of it is built for the person living across both financial worlds, not for a generic British investor or a generic Indian one.

And as the rules change — the UK’s shift to global taxation in 2025 being the most significant in years — the people who need accurate, up-to-date, cross-border thinking the most are UK-based NRIs. That’s who I write for.