Every episode in this series has arrived from a different room. But this one begins somewhere none of the others have: in the home of a grandfather teaching his 7-year-old grandson about money.
Shiv Ram Pande watched his Dadu, who was a formally trained engineer and not a finance man, save and respect money with a discipline and intentionality that Shiv says no classroom ever matched. Today Shiv is the Founding Member of BitSave, India’s first platform built to help investors access large-cap crypto indices such as Bloomberg’s Crypto Index in a safe & simple manner.
He is also the father of a four-year-old son. And the most revealing thing about Shiv is not what he knows about Bitcoin or blockchain but what he is teaching that child, and why he is starting now, at age four, with the same simplicity his Dadu used.
This episode sits at the edge of where this series has gone before. We are not just talking about financial habits or career clarity or the school curriculum. We are talking about the future of money itself and what it means for the next generation to grow up in a world where digital assets are as normal as a UPI payment and what parents need to understand about that world before their children outpace them in it.
THIS EPISODE’S GUEST
Shiv Ram Pande
Founding Team & CBO, BitSave | Ex-Vice President, Darashaw & Co. | Delhi NCR, India
Shiv Ram Pande brings more than a decade of experience across capital markets and digital assets. He began his career at Darashaw & Co., rising from trainee to Vice President while leading the Northern Desk and managing institutional pension and provident fund assets, including that of Govt. and MNC’s of over $4 billion.
He later moved into digital assets, helping a quant-based crypto hedge fund, before joining the founding team at BitSave, India’s first platform enabling investors to invest in Crypto Indices such as Bloomberg’s Crypto Index. BitSave brings the same index-based, disciplined SIP approach that made systematic investing mainstream in India to crypto with 100% assets in insured & institutional-grade custody with SIP starting at ₹1,000.
“Crypto is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It is an emerging asset class that deserves the same discipline we bring to any long-term investment. My Dadu understood that about money and passed on that knowledge to me.“
Q1. We are raising children in a world where money is increasingly digital, invisible, and even programmable. What do you think children—and parents—need to understand about money before they start using digital financial products?
Shiv:
I have a four-year-old, and to him a ten-minute Blinkit delivery is normal, and Amazon arriving the next day is boring. I do not think that is a small thing. It is the whole shift in one image. For him, wanting something and getting it have almost no gap in between, and no visible cost passes hands along the way. That is what “invisible money” really means, and it is the first thing I would want him to understand before he ever touches a card or a UPI app.
The lesson underneath is simple, and it does not change across any technology: every purchase is a trade-off. If you spend on this, you are not spending on that. Cash used to teach that lesson for free because you touched and watched the notes leave your hand, and you could see the pile getting smaller. A tap on a screen removes that feeling entirely. The money still leaves, but nothing in the child registers it. So the job for parents now is to teach deliberately what cash used to teach automatically.
The second thing I would give him is perspective on what money even is. Money is a technology, and like every technology, it has evolved and will keep evolving. What we treat as permanent is actually very recent. Money that is backed by nothing physical, that exists only because we collectively agree it has value, is roughly fifty years old. It dates to as recent as the early 1970s.
For most of history, money was tied to something you could hold. That is not an argument that the old way was better because Gold, Silver and other metals also did have transportation & safety issues. It is an argument that our version of money is, but simply one chapter, not the final one, and the next chapter is already being written in digital and programmable forms.
I want him to hold both of those at once. Money is becoming more abstract, not less, and pretending otherwise does not help him. The answer is not nostalgia for something you can touch. It is understanding the mechanism under the tap, so the abstraction does not fool him.
Practically, for parents, I would do one thing. Make the cost visible again on purpose. Use cash sometimes, even in a digital household. Say the trade-off out loud at the moment of buying. Give the child a small fixed amount that is genuinely theirs to control, so scarcity is something they feel rather than something you lecture about. Or maybe even hand them pocket money and take back 30% right in front of them to first teach them about tax!
PRERNA’S LENS →
The Gullak. A four-year-old and a coin jar. In a home where the parent works in blockchain, the first financial lesson is still the oldest one: there is a gap between earning and spending, and something lives in that gap. This is what Dr. Inchie Lonial was saying about families navigating special needs — the principles of financial survival are not asset-class specific. They are human. They predate every financial instrument that has ever existed.
What Shiv is preparing his son for is a genuinely different world. And his instinct — to build financial character before financial knowledge — is exactly right. A child who grows up with discipline and intention around money will be able to evaluate Bitcoin, mutual funds, real estate, and whatever comes after them, with the same clear-eyed judgement. A child who grows up only knowing the names of financial instruments without the character to use them will be vulnerable to every new wave of financial innovation that arrives promising fast returns.
As someone who works with parents on financial education, I find this conversation particularly important for Indian mothers specifically. The next generation of Indian wealth will be built in part through digital assets. If mothers are not in that conversation — if they are excluded from it or exclude themselves from it — they will hand off yet another financial domain to someone else. The conversation Shiv is having with his four-year-old is one every parent in India needs to begin having. Not about crypto specifically but about financial character. The rest follows.
THE LESSON SHIV CARRIES FROM HIS DADU
The teachings from his grandfather. A mental ledger of every rupee — what came in, what went out, what was saved, what was owed. Nothing wasted. Nothing borrowed without a plan to repay.
“Money is not just currency. It is a measure of your intention and your integrity.”
He was not around to see money go digital. But his instinct to preserve, to plan, to think in decades, not days, is exactly the discipline that separates the people who build wealth through emerging assets from the people who lose money in them.
“I am not teaching my son about “investing”. I am teaching him to think about money with discipline and intention, so that when he encounters new financial instruments, he has the character to engage with them wisely, not reactively.”
— Shiv Ram Pande,CBO — BitSave
Q2. Crypto and blockchain are often seen as complicated or risky concepts. From your experience, what are the biggest misconceptions people have about the future of money, and how can we build financial literacy before introducing people to new-age financial products?
Shiv:
The reputation is not entirely wrong, and that is the most important thing to say first. The get-rich-quick culture in crypto is real. The scams are real. The people who came in with wrong expectations and left the moment markets turned red- that is a documented pattern. We have seen it repeatedly since 2017.
But any asset class is not held to the standard of its worst participants. Most Bitcoin hacks are not a Bitcoin problem. They are a storage problem. Most crypto losses are not a crypto problem. They are a discipline problem—the same discipline problem that causes losses in any asset class when people invest without understanding what they own, why they own it, or what their time horizon actually is.
What most Indian parents and families misunderstand is this: crypto is not one thing. Trading crypto — trying to time the market, buy low, sell high — is as speculative and risky as it looks. But holding a diversified large-cap crypto index over a long time horizon, through a regulated & insured custody structure, with a defined allocation of 1 to 4 per cent of your portfolio is a fundamentally different activity. Same asset class, completely different discipline.
Genuine financial literacy around crypto looks like this: understanding what you are buying and why. Knowing your time horizon before you put in a rupee. Understanding the Indian tax treatment — 30 per cent on gains, 1 per cent TDS on each transfer, no loss offset — and planning for it. Understanding custody: who holds your assets, how they are protected, and what proof of reserves means. And understanding allocation: this is not where your emergency fund goes. This is not where your child’s school fees go. This is a small portion of a diversified portfolio that you may not need for several years.
We are starting to see the culture change. Our clients are continuing to allocate money into crypto for long-term portfolio diversification, regardless of short-term price movements. That shift, from speculation to discipline, is the beginning of genuine financial literacy in this space.
PRERNA’S LENS →
I want to highlight the distinction Shiv draws here because it is the most important thing in this answer: same asset class, completely different discipline. Trading crypto and holding a diversified crypto index over a long horizon are not the same activity any more than day-trading stocks and holding an index fund SIP are the same activity. They happen to involve the same underlying instruments. The approach, the risk, the mindset, and the likely outcomes are entirely different.
What Shiv is describing as genuine crypto literacy is, at its core, the same financial literacy I talk about in every workshop: know what you own, know why you own it, know your time horizon, know your allocation, and never put money you cannot afford to lose into an asset you do not fully understand. These principles are not crypto-specific. They are the principles that apply to every financial decision anyone makes. The asset class is new. The wisdom required to navigate it is age-old, and Shiv’s Dadu had it without ever having heard the word “blockchain.”
For parents specifically, the conversation to have with your children about crypto is not “here is if, how or when to buy Bitcoin.” It is the same conversation you would have about any investment: Here is what risk means, here is what diversification means, here is why discipline matters more than timing, and here is why the promise of fast returns is almost always a red flag. That conversation does not require you to understand blockchain. It requires you to understand money, and that is precisely what this series, Mom Money & Mindset, is here to build.
“Most crypto losses are not a crypto problem. They are a discipline problem—the same discipline problem that causes losses in any asset class when people invest without understanding what they own or why.”
— Shiv Ram Pande, CBO — BitSave
Q3. As someone working at the intersection of technology and finance, what money skills do you believe will become essential for the next generation—and how can parents and schools start preparing children for that future today?
Shiv:
My wife and I talk about this constantly, and our starting point is a slightly uncomfortable one: we do not actually know which financial products our son will use as an adult. The tools change every few months. So the mistake would be to teach him a toolset. What lasts is a small set of skills that work no matter what the tool turns out to be.
Three matter most to us.
The first is knowing how to judge who is talking to you. This generation will be sold constantly and invisibly by finfluencers, group chats, and feeds that are tuned to their attention. The most protective money skill they can have is the reflex to ask, who is telling me this, and what do they gain if I believe it? That single question defuses most bad financial decisions before they happen.
The second is the ability to wait. In a world of ten-minute deliveries and instant everything, delayed gratification is becoming a rare and valuable skill rather than an assumed one. Every system around a child is engineered to remove the wait. Being able to hold off, to let something grow, to not act on the first impulse, is quietly one of the highest-return financial habits there is, and it now has to be taught against the grain of the environment.
The third is learning how to learn and staying comfortable with the fact that today’s knowledge expires. When the ground shifts every six months, the durable skill is not any particular piece of knowledge; it is the habit of updating without panic. Learning is like water. It has to keep flowing. The moment it stagnates, it gathers moss.
The harder question is how you actually build these, because none of them survives a lecture. You cannot teach judgement or comfort with change by talking to a child. They are learned by doing, specifically by arguing things out.
What I have found works, both in my guest lectures and at home, is turning the session into a conversation rather than a monologue. Students switch off the moment it becomes a one-way transfer. They come alive when it is a round table where there are no wrong answers, only ideas to be raised, challenged, and refined. So my suggestion to parents and schools is small and repeatable: once a week, sit down and talk about what is happening in the world, in money, and in technology. No lecture, no right answer, no marks. Just a conversation where a child learns to reason out loud, to defend a view, and to change their mind when someone makes a better point.
That last habit, changing your mind gracefully when the facts change, is the whole game. If a child learns to do that at a dinner table at ten, they will do it with their money at thirty, no matter what money looks like by then.
Q4. If money is becoming increasingly invisible, what should we teach our children so that technology makes them financially smarter—not financially careless?
Shiv:
My answer starts with something my Dadu did with me as a 7-year-old. He used to explain a salary slip to me, line by line. He showed me his passbook and took me to the bank. He took me to the railway station and showed me how tickets are booked. He was making the invisible visible, long before anything was digital, and it is still the right instinct today.
The thing to teach, underneath all of it, is that invisibility is an illusion. The money did not disappear into the screen. It moved through systems that people built, and people run. There is a human and a mechanism behind every tap. A child who believes the phone is magic will be careless with it, because you cannot reason about magic. A child who understands that it is just people and machinery behind a screen and being programmed by people exactly like us can ask the right questions and stay in control. Nothing is invisible. It is simply hidden, and hidden things can be revealed.
How you show them changes with age, and I think the sequence matters.
When a child is young, go backwards to the physical on purpose. Pay pocket money in cash. Let them hold it, spend it, and watch the pile get visibly thinner and eventually run out. The point is not nostalgia. It is that a small child needs to feel in their hands that money is finite before any screen teaches them it is infinite. The tactile lesson has to come first, because the digital version erases it.
When they are older and ready for the machinery, go the other way, deeper into how it actually works. Show them the underlying. A bank ledger. The institution that runs the rails behind UPI. How a payment actually settles from one account to another. For a child who is curious, you can even show them a blockchain, which is just a public ledger anyone can inspect. The specific example matters less than the habit: whenever something looks automatic, ask what is happening underneath and who made it happen.
That is the whole answer, really. First make money physical again so they feel its edges. Then make the systems visible so they respect the machinery. Do both, and technology stops being a black box they trust blindly and becomes a set of tools they understand. That is the difference between a financially careless child and one who is financially smart. Not how much technology they use, but how much of it they can see through.
PRERNA’S LENS →
The teachings of Shiv’s Dadu on how to build financial character were, as Shiv tells it, more durable and more instructive than anything he later encountered in a classroom.
This sits directly alongside what every other guest in this series has said — from different rooms and different disciplines — about the gap between formal education and financial wisdom. Dr. Nitin Singh Tomar called it the difference between producing exam toppers and life-ready graduates. Amanda Severs called it the gap between a career that looks successful and one that actually is. Shiv is calling it the distance between a textbook and a grandfather’s teachings, between a syllabus and an elder’s discipline.
The asset class may be different. The principle is exactly the same as what Nidhi Vadhera said in Episode 01: stop guarding and start creating. Shiv’s Dadu was a creator, and he built purely through discipline and intention. That is the legacy Shiv is carrying into one of the most complex financial frontiers of our time. And it is the same legacy every parent in this series is trying, in their own way, to pass on.
“My Dadu teaching me financial discipline at the age of seven remains the best gift I ever received. My mantra stays the same that while the asset class I operate in may be new, the principles are the same age-old ones.”
— Shiv Ram Pande, CBO — BitSave
A Final Thought — From Prerna
Seven episodes. Seven rooms. And in every single one of them, the same truth keeps arriving in a different language.
A grandfather’s wisdom and a crypto index are further apart on the surface than almost anything this series has discussed. And yet the principle at the centre of both is identical: think before you spend, save with intention, invest with discipline, and build for a future that is longer than your current mood.
Shiv Ram Pande’s journey from fixed income to the frontier of India’s emerging digital asset industry. He carried with him the financial discipline his Dadu practised at home, and he is now carefully, deliberately passing that character to a four-year-old who will grow up in a world where the financial instruments are unrecognisably different from anything either of them knew.
That is the through-line of this entire series. Not any specific asset class, not any particular curriculum, not any single skill. It is having a financial character — the disposition to understand what you own, why you own it, and what you are building toward. Built at home. Built early. Built through the conversations we choose to have, and the ones we are finally willing to start.
Dadu would have approved. 💜
— Prerna Rohilla & Shiv Ram Pande
Financial character is built at home — long before any investment decision is made.
Start the money conversation your family needs.
Mom, Money & Mindset works with families, schools, colleges, and organisations on financial literacy, money mindset, and raising financially confident women and children across India.
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ALSO IN BEYOND THE BALANCE SHEET:
- Ep 01 | “Be a Wealth Creator, Not Just a Guardian” — Nidhi Vadhera
- Ep 02 | “The Question a Child Asked His Paediatrician” — Dr. Gaurav Mukhija
- Ep 03 | “Financial Confidence Is a Natural Extension of True Empowerment” — Dr. Manjari Shukla
- Ep 04 | “The Real Examination Begins After School Ends” — Dr. Nitin Singh Tomar
- Ep 05 | “Every Child Has a Light” — Dr. Inchie Lonial (PT)
- Ep 06 | “Build a Career You Love, Build a Life You Love” — Amanda Severs
This conversation was conducted in written format in August 2026 and has been lightly edited for clarity and flow. Views expressed are Shiv Ram Pande’s own. Shiv Ram Pande is a Founding Team Member and Chief Business Officer at BitSave — India’s first and only crypto index investment platform.
⚠️ Disclaimer: This article is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Cryptocurrency and digital assets are highly volatile, unregulated in India, and not regulated by SEBI. There may be no regulatory recourse for any loss from such transactions. BitSave and Mom Money & Mindset strongly recommend consulting a SEBI-registered financial adviser before making any investment decisions. Crypto products should not exceed 1–4% of your total investment portfolio. Past performance of any asset class is not a guarantee of future returns.