India’s large state-owned lenders including State Bank of India (SBI) and Bank of Baroda (BoB) have stepped up lateral hiring in a bid to improve beef up their digital infrastructure. Senior bankers told FE they are speeding up the process of acquiring specialized talent from the private sector.
Bank of India MD & CEO Rajneesh Karnatak confirmed public sector banks are consciously picking up talent from the private sector to improve their digital capabilities. Karnatak’s bank has just hired former Standard Chartered Bank official Yusuf Roopawalla as its new Chief Technology Officer at market-related package.
“We are going in for a structural and transformational journey,” Karnatak said adding one is an IT journey while another is a digital journey.
Some time back SBI hired former Ujjivan Small Finance MD, CEO Nitin Chugh at a market-linked package. Subsequently, the bank is understood to have recruited three more officials at the chief general manager (CGM) level, persons familiar with the development said. These executives will work in the technology and compliance departments to further enhance the bank’s digital capabilities.
“We are hiring across different levels and are taking people directly from market. Many of them will be taken on at contracts. Specifically for technology, we are hiring many people at a circle head level,” the persons said.
They added that the former CFO of SBI CS Singh Attra earned a package of nearly Rs 1.5 crore per annum during his stint at the bank. Attra had joined SBI in October 2020 and previously worked as partner at EY India and senior official at ICICI Securities, among others.
Bank of Baroda, meanwhile, has also picked up several top executives from the private sector. These include CFO Ian De Souza, Chief Digital Officer Akhil Handa, Chief Risk Officer S. Anantharaman, Chief Collection Officer Girish Patnaik and Head of Wealth Management subsidiary Virendra Somwanshi.
De Souza has over two decades of banking sector experience in large lenders such as HDFC Bank, HSBC and YES Bank while Handa was associated with JP Morgan and fintechs in his earlier stints. The last stints of Anantharaman, Patnaik and Somwanshi were at HDFC Bank, IDFC First Bank and Motilal Oswal Financial Services, respectively.
“Our intention is to take some people from the market so that they can introduce specialized practices immediately. Otherwise, we would also have to go through a learning curve which the private sector did. Instead of going through an evolution mechanism we said why not pick up someone immediately and we can start off,” a senior official at BoB said.