Ex-Infosys CFO Bansal boards Ola

Bansal will join the Softbank-backed Ola in January 2016

App-based taxi aggregator Ola on Thursday announced the appointment of Rajiv Bansal (pictured) as its chief financial officer (CFO). Bansal, who until recently used to be CFO of India’s second largest information technology services company, Infosys, would assume the charge in January, the Bengaluru-based company said.

A chartered accountant and cost accountant by profession, Bansal has over 21 years experience. The past 16 years being at Infosys, which he joined in 1999 as manager of finance. Before being elevated as the CFO at Infosys in 2012, Bansal was a vice-president and head of finance.

In his new role at Ola, Bansal would be part of the company’s leadership team. Mitesh Shah, the current CFO, would lead the strategic finance Initiatives at the taxi aggregator as part of Bansal’s team, the company added.

“We are thrilled to welcome Rajiv onboard. He brings with him a wealth of experience from his long tenure at Infosys. Rajiv’s understanding and expertise in the finance domain is extremely valuable for us at this juncture of growth,” said Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and chief executive.

Run by ANI Technologies, Ola has been consistently strengthening its top leadership as the company is starting to see increasing competition from Uber in the domestic Indian market.

A couple of months ago, the company hired Sundeep Sahni, a former managing director of Lazada Indonesia, as vice-president to drive new initiatives. In July this year, former Vodafone Group chief executive had also joined Ola’s board as an independent director.

“Ola has been growing at an extraordinary pace and has created tremendous value in the process, to customers, partners and other stakeholders under Bhavish’s leadership. As one of India’s most valuable start-ups, it carries with it a mighty responsibility of setting an example on corporate governance and best practices in finance,” said Bansal on his appointment.

Founded in 2011 by IIT-Bombay alumni Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, Ola has operations across 102 cities in India where users bank on the company to book cabs and auto-rickshaws. The company is also quite well-funded with marquee investors such as Softbank, DST Global, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global and Baillie Gifford.

Last week, the company raised $500 million (Rs 3,300 crore) in Series-F funding at a valuation of $5 billion. The company has so far raised around $1.2 billion in different rounds of funding.

TRANSITION

• Ola appoints Rajiv Bansal as chief financial officer
   
• Bansal to join company from January
   
• Bansal was former CFO at Infosys and is currently advisor to the CEO
   
• Mitesh Shah, Ola’s current CFO to lead strategic finance