These former investment bankers are changing grocery shopping in Singapore

The next time you read in the papers about how supermarkets in Singapore are evolving and migrating online, remember that two former investment bankers could very well have played a major role in shaping the landscape.

No, no one’s buying over NTUC Fairprice or Cold Storage.

Meet Roger Egan III and Vikram Rupani, the co-founders of RedMart, a new online supermarket that emerged in the scene last year (see product feature) and received seed funding from Toivo Annus, the co-founder of Skype, in December 2011.

Their mission: To create the “eBay for Consumer Packaged Goods manufacturers” — the makers of of instant noodles and the ever-useful toilet paper.

Don’t let their résumés fool you — these two have entrepreneurship in their bones. Vikram, who is the CFO and COO, started the first polyester and alkyd resin manufacturing plant in Bahrain after leaving his cushy job as a research analyst at a hedge fund.

Prior to that, he was an investment banking analyst at JPMorgan.

Roger, meanwhile, displayed an instinct for opportunity and propensity toward entrepreneurship early on. At 10 years old, his first business was shoveling snow off his neighbors’ driveways, even hiring other kids to do it.

But he never saw entrepreneurship as a serious way to make money. After graduation, only two career choices made sense to him.

“I was peer pressured into thinking that investment banking or consulting were the only two respectable  career paths at the time,” he said candidly.

“That was the mentality of our peers before the financial crisis hit,” Vikram chimed in.

In the end, Roger left his position as an Associate at Omega Capital, and started an insurance brokerage company that went on to raise US$320 million in venture capital.

Their paths crossed when they did their Masters at the INSEAD Asia Campus.

Reflecting on his career at JPMorgan, Vikram said that there were many traits he picked up that — while not obvious at first glance — are actually important to starting their business.

“I am primarily responsible for finance, operations, and supply chain at RedMart – and being good at this requires a keen eye for detail, comfort with numbers, and ability to deal with large amounts of data – all skills which I picked up while working in banking and trading” he said.

Roger, meanwhile, had the idea of starting an online supermarket as a simple result of being busy at his banking job.