It’s not as if Madhabi Puri Buch has not faced challenges before: a three-and-a-half-decade car­eer in the rapidly evolving world of finance would guarantee that enough came her way. In the late ’90s, while working at ICICI Bank, her manager admonished her for being technologically illiterate. “I was told that unless I made friends with technology, I wouldn’t be going anywhere in the firm,” she told india today in an interview last November. The message fired her determination to master technology, so much so that in a matter of months, the same boss entrusted her with the responsibility of launching icicidirect.com, one of India’s earliest online trading platforms.