MAM
Asheesh Malhotra joins Bates CHI&Partners as Mumbai head
MUMBAI: Bates CHI&Partners has appointed Asheesh Malhotra as president and head of its Mumbai office.
Malhotra will report to CEO Srikanth VS and will work closely with chief strategy officer Sourabh Mishra and chief creative officer Manmohan Anchan (Maac), NCD Sagar Mahabaleshwarkar and other members of the management team to drive the India growth agenda.
Srikanth said, “Asheesh is one of the most talented people in our business today. In particular, he shines at growing existing client relationships and winning new business. His appointment is key to our growth agenda, by demonstrating fully our ability to deliver ‘Big Ideas for Ambitious Brands’.”
Malhotra with 18 years of experience, including his term with Ogilvy Mumbai from where he moves to Bates CHI&Partners, saw him leading the business on the largest Unilever portfolio – the beverages division for south Asia. Besides Unilever, he also led the Castrol lubricants global hub in India, BP corporate and a clutch of financial businesses – Bank of India, SBI Life Insurance and Federal Bank.
Anew business junkie Malhotra said, “Bates CHI&Partners is a true blue new model agency. It breaks the traditional mould of ‘in-house only talent and resources’, and instead practices true collaboration by pulling together the best resources that the world has to offer, especially in the disciplines of digital, social and retail. As a result, we can offer solutions that are designed to break through more quickly, thus saving clients loads of media bucks. Recent interactions with clients have reaffirmed the need for such a nimble and creative agency model.”
From 2001 to 2009, Malhotra worked at Lowe Mumbai where he headed the Prudential Life Insurance brand since its inception in India.
MUMBAI: In India’s fast-moving payments race, Visa has just swiped in a new leader. The company has named Suresh Sethi as its India country head, marking a key leadership shift as it sharpens its focus on digital payments growth in the market. Sethi steps into the role following his recent exit from Protean eGov Technologies, where he served as chief executive officer. He succeeds Sandeep Ghosh, who has moved on after more than four years at Visa to pursue an external opportunity.
The appointment comes at a time when Visa is doubling down on its expansion strategy across India and the wider region, deepening partnerships and accelerating adoption in an increasingly competitive digital payments ecosystem.
Sethi brings with him a broad, cross-market perspective shaped by decades of experience across corporate banking, retail financial services, mobile money and large-scale government technology initiatives. He began his career at Citigroup, where he spent 14 years working across India, Africa, South America and the United States, focusing on transaction banking services within the corporate bank.
His appointment signals a blend of institutional experience and market familiarity qualities that could prove critical as Visa navigates a landscape where fintech innovation, regulatory evolution and consumer adoption are all accelerating at once.
As digital payments in India continue to scale rapidly, the leadership change underscores a simple reality, in a market where every tap, scan and swipe counts, who leads the charge can matter just as much as the technology itself.
