Brands
Navi onboards MS Dhoni as its brand ambassador
Mumbai: Sachin Bansal-backed Navi has appointed cricketer MS Dhoni as its brand ambassador. MS Dhoni will be the face of Navi’s branding initiatives. The association with the iconic former team India captain strengthens the brand’s trustworthiness as it works to fulfil customer goals by providing simple, affordable, and easily accessible financial services across India.
Navi has launched its first ad with Dhoni on Hotstar during Thursday’s India vs. England T20 semi-final match. The goal of this campaign is to promote Navi’s prompt and accessible financial services by dismantling the old and conventional ways of doing business in this sector. The campaign will initially run on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube before moving on to print and out-of-home (OOH) advertising in the second phase.
Dhoni said, “Today’s India is intelligent, aspirational, and always working toward its goal. It is crucial for billions of Indians to achieve and surpass their life goals, which is why Navi and I have teamed up to make this vision a reality. Navi’s mission is to make financial services easily accessible whenever they are needed. I am very excited about this new journey with Navi.”
Navi Group co-founder Sachin Bansal said, “We are thrilled to introduce MS Dhoni as our brand ambassador and the newest member of the Navi family. He personifies trust, ambition, and dedication—qualities that resonate powerfully with Navi and all we stand for, making him the ideal brand ambassador. Associating with him, in my opinion, would greatly enhance the value of our brand and further our mission to provide every Indian with simple, affordable, and reliable financial services.”
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.
