Team
Nav Kumar
Founder, Managing Director
Nav is Managing Director and Co-Founder at Meridian, set up as a strategic Merchant Banking firm supporting financial stability and economic prosperity globally. Nav is a graduate in Architecture (MA Hons) and Civil Engineering (MSc), studying at University of Cambridge and Cardiff University respectively, where his specialty was post-conflict reconstruction and redevelopment, including rapid coastal urbanisation. He practiced as an Architect following graduation, designing hospitals in the UK and Sri Lanka, a mosque in Doha Qatar, schools in the UK, mixed-use developments in Sri Lanka, before moving to Sri Lanka to focus on direct post-conflict redevelopment after the end of the 30-year civil war, contributing to internally displaced people’s housing design, going on to focus on Development Finance through his founded company P1F Limited, raising c.$250m between 2015 and 2019 for development in Sri Lanka. He has presented at the World Economic Forum, UK Government events as part of Belt & Road initiatives in China, and actively advises both private and state-owned enterprises engaged in frontier-market investment and development. Nav has received awards from the Royal Institute of British Architects, and is a member of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects.
Following the terrorist attacks on Easter Sunday 2019 in Colombo Sri Lanka, he went on to found Meridian as a globally diversified financial firm focused on financing economic and civil stability and economic prosperity. Meridian is now regulated as an Appointed Representative by the FCA in the UK, and 15a-6 Chaperone by the SEC in the US permitting arranging, advisory and mergers and acquisitions regulatory services in the US and UK.
Privately, Nav is a violinist, pianist, painter, enjoys long-distance running, is a private pilot (SEP VFR with the CAA), speaks English and Chinese (Mandarin), and is passionate about using capitalism to support civic stability and economic prosperity.
Aijan S.
Senior Advisor
Aijan S is a senior project finance professional based in London with over two decades of experience in international corporate and investment banking, currently serving as Head of Project Finance Advisory, EMEA / Director at Korea Development Bank. A CFA charterholder with a First Class Honours M.Eng. in Chemical Engineering from UMIST, she has built a career spanning the full deal lifecycle—origination, structuring, due diligence, syndication, and negotiation—at institutions including KDB, CIBC (New York), CoBank (Denver), ING Bank (London/Frankfurt), WestLB, Fitch Ratings, and the EBRD. Her sector focus is energy, with deep expertise across renewables, thermal power, transmission, natural resources, and increasingly green hydrogen and energy transition, and she has worked across both developed and emerging markets in the US, EMEA, and Central Asia.
Cameron Thomas
Economist
Cameron Thomas is a recent Economics graduate from Girton College, University of Cambridge (BA, 2:1), currently pursuing CFA Level 1, with Firsts at Cambridge in Econometric Methods and Economic History & Philosophy. His most substantive experience is a summer 2024 internship at the Bank of England as an actuarial analyst in the PRA, where he initiated the reform of pension funds' capital requirements under Solvency II using regressions in R, proposed a fixed modelling recovery rate for corporate bond credit risk, built a market monitoring program reporting risk percentiles across market indicators, and was awarded the highest performance rating ("excelling"); he was also seconded to European Surveillance in Monetary Analysis to produce a pre-MPC report on euro area HICP inflation and shadowed the Markets valuation team across DCFs, swap resets, and fixed-income pricing. He is proficient in R, Stata, Bloomberg Terminal, and financial modelling (three-statement, DCF, comparable companies), and beyond banking founded the Girton College Debates Union, serves as Head of Events at The Wilberforce Society (authoring a research paper on political risk insurance in US Development Finance), and co-founded an international tutoring scheme for Afghan students under the guidance of Fawzia Koofi.
Jessica Larner
Junior Economist
Jessica Larner is a 2025 Economics graduate from the University of Cambridge (BA Hons, 2:1; 71% in her final year), where she was awarded the Angela Dunn Gardener Scholarship, achieved the highest grade in her cohort of c.150 students in Macroeconomics (84%), and wrote her dissertation on the impact of political instability on carbon dioxide emissions in the OECD. Her most substantive professional experience prior to Meridian was a 2024 internship at consultancy Public First, where she contributed to 11 projects advising international clients including Google, Uber, and Santander on investment opportunities, market forecasts, and branding—using R and Python for econometric analysis, authoring an independent company blog article with JavaScript-coded graphics, and contributing to a Santander trade report later praised by the Minister for Services, Small Businesses and Exports. She is currently a Junior Economist at Meridian Universal, focused on Uzbekistan and the US, affordable housing, government financing structures, and the macro-economic nexus between strategic infrastructure and geopolitics, and also volunteers as an adviser at Citizens Advice West Sussex on debt, family, and housing law. Beyond her professional work, she co-founded the Girton College Debates Union (later Vice President), is an active member of the Joan Robinson Society, and is an RYA Day Skipper-qualified sailor who trained with the Cambridge University Yacht Club.
Julia Truscott
Chief Compliance Officer
Julia Truscott FCSI (Chartered) is a senior risk and compliance executive with over 20 years of experience across buy-side and sell-side investment firms, holding an LLM in Law & Finance from Bournemouth University and the CISI Diploma in Investment Compliance. She is an experienced SMF holder (SMF16 Compliance Oversight and SMF17 MLRO) with deep practical expertise in UK and international regulatory frameworks—including FCA, SEC, CFTC, DFSA, MAS, Hong Kong SFC, and Channel Islands regimes—and broad product coverage spanning asset management, hedge funds, commodities, equities, fixed income, corporate finance, fintech, and crypto. Most recently, she served for over five years as Senior Manager, International Risk & Compliance (SMF16 & SMF17) at AustralianSuper (UK) Ltd, where she led the Fund's international compliance obligations across multiple jurisdictions and acted as principal point of contact with the FCA and other non-Australian regulators; she now consults at Tetractys Partners LLP, advising asset managers, hedge funds, custodians, wholesale brokers, fintech, and crypto firms on FCA authorisations, compliance audits, mock regulatory inspections, governance reviews, and discreet investigations. Earlier in her career, she was Head of UK Compliance & Deputy MLRO (CF10) at CLSA (UK), where she oversaw implementation of MiFID II, EMIR, MAR, GDPR, and SMCR for the Asia-Pacific investment bank, with prior compliance roles at Stifel Nicolaus, Religare Capital Markets, and Renaissance Capital. She speaks English and Russian, and outside of work runs a clay pigeon shooting club where she mentors new participants and supports experienced shooters.
Amar Hanibal
Mongolia Country Head
Amartuvshin (Amar) Hanibal is a senior banking executive and former Member of Parliament with over 20 years of international banking, structured finance, sovereign engagement, and public policy experience, holding an MBA from Harvard Business School (2007) and a BBA from European University Brussels. Most recently he served as CEO of Erchist Mongol LLC (2025–2026), the state holding company overseeing Mongolia's major non-mining SOEs including MIAT Mongolian Airlines, Mongolian Railways, and public utilities, where he led group-wide restructuring to strengthen profitability, governance, and capital discipline. From 2020 to 2024 he served as a Member of Parliament in the State Great Khural of Mongolia, sitting on the Budget and Foreign Policy Committees, co-chairing the USA–Mongolia Parliamentary Group, authoring amendments to the Banking Law enabling IPOs of large commercial banks, and co-authoring legislation eliminating 1,000+ permits to improve Mongolia's investment climate. His prior executive career includes CEO of the Development Bank of Mongolia (2019–2020), where he led the country's policy bank for long-term infrastructure and export financing; President & Head of Corporate Banking at XacBank / TenGer Financial Group (2011–2019), where he led project finance transactions in renewables and infrastructure and advised on M&A and structured finance through TenGer Capital; a senior role at JSC Kazkommertsbank in Almaty (2007–2011) as a member of the Managing Board and Board of Directors of KKB Kyrgyzstan; and earlier, Associate Director in Structured & Project Finance at ABN AMRO Bank N.V. (1999–2007) across Amsterdam, London, and Chicago, where he structured multi-billion USD/EUR project and acquisition financings in energy, utilities, and infrastructure. He brings an extensive institutional network across Mongolia's political and business establishment, regulators, SOEs, and IFIs, and is fluent in Mongolian, English, and Russian, with basic French and Dutch.