Ajay Kanwal to head Standard Chartered's ASEAN region including India

India CEO to be appointed soon, as Sunil Kaushal to head Africa & Middle East ops

In a major reshuffle of its top deck, Standard Chartered Bank today appointed Ajay Kanwal as head of the ASEAN & South Asia region including India and will also appoint a new chief executive for India operations as its present CEO Sunil Kaushal, will lead the Africa and Middle East business.

The India CEO will be reporting to Kanwal who will be based out of Singapore. Both Kanwal and Kaushal’s new roles will be effective from 1sOctober.

The other two regions-Greater China & North Asia will be led by Ben Hung where as Tracy Clarke will head the Europe & Americas region. From here on, the head of all the four regions will be directly reporting to Bill Winters the Group Chief Executive of Standard Chartered.

The British lender has reorganised the current eight business regions into four in order to improve efficiency.

 “The Group needs to kick-start performance, reduce its cost base and bureaucracy, improve accountability, and speed up decision making. The new structure will help achieve all of these critical objectives and will be in place as we communicate a comprehensive plan to address the Group’s performance by the year end,” said Winters.

Aparty from this the lender has also announced regrouping its client businesses under three heads -- Corporate and Institutional Banking, Retail Banking and Commercial and Private Banking. 

In a statement the lender said that the new structure will play a key part in delivering the earlier announced target of $1.8 billion (approx Rs 11,350 crore) of cost savings by the end of 2017.

Winters took over the reins of the bank in June this year after Peter Sands quit in February after the dismal performance of the bank in the last couple of years. Along with Sands, Jaspal Bindra, who was the group executive director and CEO of Asia had also stepped down from the board.

In India, Standard Chartered Bank-largest foreign lender in the country in terms of branch network- reported better performance in FY15. It managed to grow its net profit by a whopping 93% in the last financial year to Rs Rs 3,051.4 crore. However, the pressure on asset quality hasn’t eased till now. In FY15 the gross non-performing asset (NPA) ratio increased to 8.90% from 7.82% at the end of March 2014.

This comes after the bank had witnessed a 46% decline in its India net profit in FY14 to Rs 1,584 crore from Rs 2,960 crore a year before on account of higher specific provisions made against advances.

“We recently reported strong domestic financial performance in India and the business is well poised to seize the opportunities presented by the coming economic turnaround supported by a business friendly Government,” said Kaushal.

In FY13, Standard Chartered had emerged as the most profitable foreign lender in the country but after the dismal performance in FY14, it lost the position to Citibank which continues to be the most profitable foreign lender in India.