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Maruti Suzuki shuffles executive deck
MUMBAI: Maruti Suzuki has turbocharged its leadership lineup with two heavyweight appointments that promise to rev up the company’s strategic engines.
Sunil Kakkar, a 35-year veteran of the automotive trenches, will slide into the director (corporate planning) role from 1 April 2025. An IIT Kanpur engineer with an MBA gold medal, Kakkar arrives with a portfolio that reads like a automotive industry roadmap—from supply chain mastery to international joint venture architecting.
His corporate credentials include chairing industry bodies like SIAM’s Aatmanirbhar Bharat Sourcing Group and holding directorial seats across multiple associate companies. With awards like supply chain leader of the year, Kakkar has the right credentials.
Joining the corporate pit crew is Tapan Sahoo, designated head of digital enterprise and information & cyber security. An IIT Delhi alumnus with a PhD and “fellow” status from prestigious engineering academies, Sahoo brings 33 years of technology management firepower.
His brief? Turbocharg digital transformation, leverage AI/ML technologies, and collaborate with startups and academia. With multiple patents and research publications under his belt, Sahoo looks set to be Maruti Suzuki’s digital alchemist.
These appointments signal Maruti Suzuki’s intent to blend traditional automotive expertise with cutting-edge technological innovation—a strategic chess move in an increasingly complex mobility landscape.
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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.
