Panelists

 

Panel Discussion 1

Theme

Competitiveness of Indian Commercial Banks

Panelists

Moderator

Sankar De: Executive Director, Centre for Analytical Finance, Indian School of Business
 
Panel Discussion 2
Theme Social Responsibilities of the Indian Banking Sector
Panelists
Moderator Suman Bery: Director-General, NCAER
Special address
Professor Raghuram Rajan: Chair, Committee on Financial Sector Reform, Planning Commission; Eric J Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, University of Chicago.
He will focus on the Committee’s recommendations on the banking sector.
 

Panel 1

O P Bhatt

O P Bhatt is Chairman, State Bank of India. He is the winner of the CNN-IBN Indian of The Year 2007 award in the Business category. His 34 years in SBI have covered a variety of assignments both in domestic and international banking. Prior to taking over as Chairman SBI, he served as the Managing Director of SBI and was in charge of the Bank's National Banking Group, which handles the entire retail portfolio of the Bank. He has served as the Bank's representative at Washington D.C. where his duties included maintaining rapport with FRB, FDIC, US Exim, Indian Embassy, American Banks, World Bank, IMF. Bhatt was also responsible for arranging money market lines for  the Bank's foreign offices, arrangement of syndicated/project finance loans, etc. A National Science Talent Search scholar, he pursued a degree in Science followed by a Masters in English.

 
 
PJ Nayak

Dr P Jayendra Nayak is the Chairman and CEO of Axis Bank. He has been the CMD for UTI (now Axis) Bank since January 2000. Earlier, Dr Nayak worked as Executive Trustee, Unit Trust of India. Before that, during 1971-96 he was with the Indian Administrative Service, from which he took early retirement. During the period 1990-95, he worked as Joint Secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs in the Finance Ministry of the Government of India. Since January 2000, he has also been a member of the Committee for Development Policy of the United Nations. He has also been a consultant with the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and UNDP. Dr Nayak has an MA and a PhD (in Economics) from Cambridge University, U.K

   
 
   
Sanjay Nayar

Sanjay Nayar is the CEO for Citigroup-India, and the Area Head for Citigroup operations in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. Earlier, Nayar worked in the Fixed Income Group across Salomon Smith Barney (SSB) and Citicorp Securities, responsible for the emerging markets business in SSB New York for 5 years covering fixed income currencies and derivatives. During this stint, he was responsible for the integration of the Citibank and SSB sales forces, following the merger of Citibank and Travelers’ Group (1998). He was also responsible for the integration of the Citibank derivatives and local market products with SSB’s dollar fixed income platform. Prior to this Nayar was in London for 3 years heading up the Emerging Markets Equities for Citibank London. Between 1985 and 1994, he held various positions across the Corporate Bank and the Transaction Bank in Citibank India, including that of the Corporate Finance and Capital Market Business Head. Nayar has a PGDM from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and a bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering from Delhi University.

 
 
   
Joydeep Sengupta  

Joydeep Sengupta is currently Director, McKinsey and Company in India. He leads the Financial Services Practice in India and co-leads the practice in Asia-Pacific and the McKinsey Knowledge Center, the firm's global offshore research unit . He has served several financial institutions in the US, Europe, Asia and India on a wide range of issues related to strategy, organisation and operations and has also been involved with a number of policy making institutions including central banks and economic development boards in Asian countries on regulatory and policy related issues. Sengupta is an MBA.

   
Sankar De
Professor Sankar De is the Executive Director, Centre for Analytical Finance (CAF), at the Indian School of Business. Until recently, he taught in graduate programmes at Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, USA, his alma mater. Prior to coming to the ISB, he was Executive Director, Center for Professional Development in Finance (CPDF), Berkeley. Professor De’s teaching and research interests include all major fields of corporate finance, including corporate valuation, corporate diversification and planning, and corporate mergers, acquisitions, and spin-offs. His pioneering research work on the merger and consolidation of financial institutions received a US national research award in 1988. He was nominated for the teacher-of-the-year award several times at Haas School of Business. He has been profiled in the Business Week’s annual Guide to the Best Business Schools, perhaps the highest global recognition in business education and research.
 

 
Panel 2
Rajesh Chakrabarti
Professor Rajesh Chakrabarti is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad and a fellow of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center, Wharton, USA. Before joining the ISB, Professor Chakrabarti taught at the College of Management, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA and University of Alberta, Canada. He has been a Visiting Faculty at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta and at ICN, Nancy, France; a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank at Atlanta and at the India Development Foundation, Gurgaon; and has worked at the Industrial Finance Corporation of India (IFCI), New Delhi. Professor Chakrabarti’s research interests include the areas of Indian Financial Market, International Finance, Microfinance and Political Economy. He has authored two books including the Financial Sector in India – Emerging Issues, and several articles in top Finance, Economics and Management journals. He is the Chief Economist (Honorary) at Creditwatch, a Kolkata-based microfinance training and research organisation. Professor Chakrabarti graduated with Honours in Economics from Presidency College, Calcutta. He received his Post Graduate Diploma in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and PhD in Management from the University of California at Los Angeles, USA.
 
K G Karmakar
Dr K G Karmakar is the Managing Director of NABARD. He has rendered thirty years of service in the financial sector. He started his career as a banker in the State Bank of India in 1975 and subsequently served in the Reserve Bank of India and opted for NABARD in 1983 to serve in agriculture and the rural development sector. He has wide exposure and field level experience in remote and tribal parts of India. He has authored several books, including "Agricultural Project Management for Bankers," "Rural Credit: Micro Credit Needs and SHGs" and "Silenced Drums" and published more than 25 articles related to rural credit and rural development. Dr Karmakar has represented NABARD in many international forums. He has a Masters degree in Financial Management and a PhD from the University of Bombay.
   
 
   
Vijay Mahajan  
Vijay Mahajan is a social entrepreneur and Chairman of BASIX, a group he founded in 1996. He started work in rural economic development in 1981. In 1983, he founded an NGO, PRADAN. Thereafter, in 1991, Mahajan decided to work as an independent trainer, consultant and researcher and to focus exclusively on the issue of rural livelihood. Realising the need to attract mainstream financial resources, he conceptualised the establishment of BASIX, which he founded in 1996. Mahajan was selected an “Outstanding Social Entrepreneur” by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in 2002. He has been a keynote speaker to the OECD Foreign Aid Ministers in Paris in 2004, at the Geneva Private Equity Conference on Microfinance, 2005; and at the Goldman Sachs global forum on microfinance, 2006. He has been an advisor to the Planning Commission, Government of India, the state governments of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Sikkim, and to the RBI and NABARD. He has co-authored a book “The Forgotten Sector” on rural, non-farm sector in India and has published over 50 articles on rural livelihood, development and micro-finance in international journals. He serves on Boards of several NGOs, and is a member of the Executive Committee of CGAP, a global consortium on microfinance. An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, he studied management at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
   
MBN Rao
M B N Rao is Chairman and Managing Director, Canara Bank and took over as the Chairman of Indian Banks Association for the term 2007-08. Rao is an associate of the Chartered Institute of Bankers, London, Fellow Member of the Indian Institute of Bankers and a member of the Singapore Institute of Management. He is the Chairman of various subsidiaries of Canara Bank, viz., Canbank Factors Limited; Canbank Computer Services Limited; Canbank Venture Capital Fund Limited; Gilt Securities Trading Corporation Limited and Indo Hong Kong International Finance Limited. He is also the Deputy Chairman on the Board of The Commercial Bank of India, Moscow, a joint venture of State Bank of India and Canara Bank. Rao is a Director on the Board of the Agricultural Finance Corporation of India and Director on the Board of NABARD Consultancy Services Pvt. Ltd. He holds a Diploma in Computer Studies from University of Cambridge and National Computing Centre, London and a Certificate in Industrial Finance.
 
 
Usha Thorat

Usha Thorat, is a deputy governor at the Reserve Bank of India. She has been with the Reserve Bank since 1972 and has vast experience in cash and debt management of central and state governments, government securities market development and regulation, financial markets, forex reserve management, foreign exchange management, banking regulation and supervision and payment and settlement systems. She was a member of the faculty at the Reserve Bank Staff College. She has been on the boards of the Bank of Baroda, Indian Overseas Bank and the Securities Trading Corporation of India. Thorat is on important committees of the RBI - Group on Instruments of Sterilisation, Group of State Finance Secretaries on Fiscal Risk of Guarantees, Group on Ways and Means Advances to State Governments and Committee on Capital Account Convertibility. She is presently a member of the Committee on Global Financial Systems of the Bank for International Settlements and also served as a member of the International Task Force on Security Settlement Systems set up by the International Organization of Securities Commissions of the Bank for International Settlements. Thorat received her M A in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics.

   
Suman Bery
Dr Suman Bery is the current Director General of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi, a position he has held since 2001. Earlier he was Lead Economist for Brazil at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., USA. Between 1992 and 1994, Dr Bery served as a Special Consultant to the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India during which he was actively involved in developing proposals for reform of the government debt markets, linkages between general financial sector deregulation and the development of the bond market, as well as issues of market structure, drawing upon the experience of other developing countries. Dr Bery's publications include papers on Indian Financial Sector reforms; Reforms of Public Sector Banks; Banking Crises in Latin America and the Political Economy of Economic reforms in developing countries. He serves on the Central Board of the State Bank of India, India's largest bank. He has been a member of several government committees and task forces. Dr Bery graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford and holds degrees from Princeton University - Master of Public and International Affairs and PhD in monetary policy instruments of the Reserve Bank of India.
 
Special address
   
Raghuram Rajan  
Professor Raghuram Rajan is the Chair, Comittee on Financial Sector Reform, Planning Commission. He is also Eric J Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago. Until recently, he was the Economic Counselor and Director of Research, International Monetary Fund, the first finance researcher and the youngest person ever to hold this very influential research position. Among numerous honours and distinctions, he received the inaugural Fischer Black Prize awarded biannually by the American Finance Association for outstanding contributions to finance by a scholar under 40. As CAF Academic Fellow 2007, he visited the Centre during the Summer Research Conference in August, 2007 and delivered the keynote address at the conference.
   
   
 
 
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