Brands
Sandeep Walunj joins Equirus Group as chief growth officer
MUMBAI: Equirus Group has brought on board seasoned business leader Sandeep Walunj as its chief growth officer, signalling a fresh push towards sharper positioning and faster, more connected growth across the Group.
In his new role, Walunj will lead Equirus’ growth agenda, strengthen its corporate identity and ensure that the Group’s diverse financial businesses move forward with a shared purpose. The appointment comes as Equirus accelerates expansion across multiple financial services verticals.
An alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad, Walunj brings nearly three decades of experience spanning India and the Middle East and North Africa. His career has blended strategy with storytelling, covering brand building, market expansion, digital sales, consumer segmentation and, more recently, data science and GenAI-led growth initiatives.
He is widely recognised for his role on the Financial Literacy Committee of the Association of Mutual Funds in India, where he helped drive the influential Mutual Funds Sahi Hai campaign. The initiative played a key role in reshaping public perception of equity investing and fuelling long-term growth in mutual funds and broking.
Walunj’s work has earned him multiple industry accolades, including CMO of the Year in 2017, 2019 and 2023, and Businessperson of the Year in 2018. Beyond executive roles, he remains closely engaged with the wider ecosystem as a member of the Asia-Pacific Advisory Board of the CMO Council in the US and the BFSI Committee of the Indian Chamber of Commerce, West Region.
Welcoming him to the Group, Equirus Group managing director Ajay Garg, said the timing could not be better. With several businesses entering their next growth phase, Garg noted that Walunj’s mix of financial services insight, brand-led thinking and technology-driven transformation would add valuable depth to the leadership team.
Walunj said Equirus presented a rare opportunity to build customer-first growth across a diverse financial platform. His focus, he added, will be on creating a clear growth narrative powered by data, technology and strong collaboration, with an eye firmly on long-term, sustainable value creation.
Brands
Samsung certifies 1,000 Maharashtra students in AI and coding
The South Korean electronics giant marks its first large-scale skilling push in the state, with women making up nearly half the national programme’s enrolment
PUNE: Samsung has put 1,000 students in Maharashtra through a certified training programme in artificial intelligence and coding, the largest such drive the South Korean electronics company has run in the state and a signal that corporate India’s skilling ambitions are moving well beyond the boardroom brochure.
The certifications were awarded under Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), the company’s flagship corporate social responsibility programme, which launched in India in 2022 with the stated aim of democratising access to future-technology education. The 1,000 graduates were drawn from four institutions: 127 from Savitribai Phule Pune University, 373 from Pimpri Chinchwad University, 250 from D.Y. Patil University’s Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology and 250 from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Kalsekar Technical Campus. All completed training in either AI or coding and programming, the two disciplines Samsung has identified as the critical pillars of the digital economy.
The programme does not stop at technical training. Soft-skills development and career-readiness modules are baked into the curriculum, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what universities teach and what employers actually want.
“India’s digital growth story will ultimately be shaped by the quality of its talent pipeline,” said Shubham Mukherjee, head of CSR and corporate communications at Samsung Southwest Asia. “As technologies like AI move from the periphery to the core of industries, skilling must evolve from basic training to building real-world capability. This milestone in Maharashtra reflects how industry and academia can come together to create a future-ready workforce that is both globally competitive and locally relevant.”
The Maharashtra drive sits within a rapidly scaling national effort. Samsung Innovation Campus trained 20,000 young people across India in 2025, hitting its stated target for the year. Women account for 48 per cent of national enrolments, a figure the company cites as evidence of its push for an inclusive technology ecosystem. The programme is implemented in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India and the Telecom Sector Skill Council.
Samsung, which is marking 30 years in India this year, runs SIC alongside two other initiatives, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow and Samsung DOST, as part of a broader effort to build what it calls a generation of innovators with both the technical depth and the problem-solving mindset to thrive in a fast-moving digital world.
A thousand certified students is a tidy headline. Whether they find jobs that match their new skills is the harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether corporate skilling programmes like this one are genuine pipelines or well-photographed gestures.
