Brands
Google appoints Kanika Kalra as director of consumer apps and platforms marketing
Former McKinsey partner and Reckitt marketing leader to drive growth
MUMBAI: Google has appointed Kanika Kalra as director of consumer apps and platforms marketing, where she will lead marketing strategy and growth initiatives for the company’s consumer applications and platforms in the region.
Kalra brings more than two decades of experience across consulting, technology and consumer goods, with a career that has moved seamlessly between boardrooms, brand labs and digital platforms.
She joins Google after serving as regional marketing director for health at Reckitt in South Asia, a role she held from April 2024 to March 2026. There, she led marketing strategy for the company’s health portfolio across the region.
Before Reckitt, Kalra spent over six years at McKinsey & Company in Mumbai, rising through the ranks to become a partner. During her time at the consulting firm, she advised leading companies on growth strategy, marketing transformation and consumer engagement.
Her earlier career includes leadership roles across some of the biggest names in consumer brands and e-commerce. She served as vice president of marketing at Snapdeal, and previously worked at Unilever as global brand director, where she led core and innovation work on the Fair & Lovely portfolio.
Kalra also held marketing roles at Hindustan Unilever, PepsiCo Foods Private Limited and GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare, building experience across categories ranging from personal care to food and health products.
She began her professional journey at Genpact before moving into marketing and consulting roles that would define her career.
Kalra holds a PGDM in marketing from the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi.
With experience that spans consumer brands, consulting and digital platforms, Kalra’s move to Google marks a return to the fast-moving world of tech, where marketing meets scale and strategy meets speed.
Brands
YES Bank appoints S Anantharaman as chief risk officer
Former Jio Financial Services group chief risk officer takes charge of enterprise-wide risk at the embattled private lender
MUMBAI: YES Bank is not taking chances with risk anymore. The private lender has appointed S Anantharaman as its chief risk officer, a hire that signals the bank’s continued effort to rebuild credibility and tighten the controls that once famously slipped.
Anantharaman arrives from Jio Financial Services, where he served as group chief risk officer and built a risk management architecture spanning lending, payments, insurance broking and asset management from the ground up. Before that, he held the chief risk officer role at Bank of Baroda and senior leadership positions at HDFC Bank and L&T Finance Holdings. Three decades in banking and financial services, in other words, with scars and qualifications to match. He is a chartered accountant and a CFA charterholder.
At YES Bank, his brief is considerable. Anantharaman will oversee the bank’s entire enterprise-wide risk framework, covering credit policy, market risk, operational risk, information security, data governance, analytics, model governance and data privacy. It is, in short, every lever that matters when a bank is trying to prove it has grown up.
YES Bank’s turbulent past needs little rehearsing. What it needs now is exactly what Anantharaman has spent thirty years building: the kind of risk culture that stops problems before they become headlines. The appointment suggests the bank knows it.
