American financial magazine Barron’s has listed the name of HDFC Bank managing director Aditya Puri’s name in its list of world’s 30 best CEOs. The 66-year-old holds 23rd position in the list beating social media giant Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg who is listed on the 30th spot. While the top position has been secured by Mary Barra of General Motors, Gary Dickerson of Applied Materials is on the second spot, Stephen Hemsley on third Jensen Huang of Nvidia on forth and Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella is on fifth sport along with the names of Amazon’s CEO Jeffrey Bezos, Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings, Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz on different spots in the list.

Explaining reasons behind listing Puri’s name, Barron’s said the man has transformed HDFC Bank from a start-up into one of the world’s highest-quality banks, generating eye-popping returns by maintaining lending standards and expanding beyond corporate loans into a full-service retail bank. According to the magazine, a 2014 trip to Silicon Valley made Puri a digital evangelist. In hallmark style, the banker swiftly set out to remake India’s second-largest private-sector bank into the digital spot for anything money-related, it said. And that is proving to be a bigger competitive advantage than even Puri imagined, courtesy to India’s surprise demonetisation in November. The Centre’s move to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes voided 86 percent of the country’s cash and catapulted demand for digital payments, Barron’s said.

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Meanwhile, mentioning Mary Barra, the magazine said she “exemplified traits that impressed us.” Satya Nadella also made an entry in the list for the first time and secured the fifth position. For Nadella, the magazine said he “has transformed Microsoft (MSFT) from a potential cloud victim into a cloud landlord.” This has involved reinventing Microsoft Windows and Office as online services that generate steady licensing and subscription fees along with establishing Azure as a lucrative cloud platform, helped by the fact that so many servers already run Microsoft software, said the magazine.

(With inputs from PTI)