New SBI chief: Banks Board Bureau starts finding Bhattacharya's successor

Arundhati Bhattacharya will complete her four-year term as the chairperson on October 6

The Banks Board Bureau (BBB) headed by former Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Vinod Rai on Thursday interviewed four candidates for the State Bank of India (SBI) chairman’s post. Arundhati Bhattacharya, the present chairman, retires in October.

The four SBI managing directors (MDs) were interviewed by three sub-committees under the BBB, sources said.

B Sriram, the bank’s senior-most managing director, along with Rajnish Kumar, P K Gupta and Dinesh Kumar Khara faced the panel, sources said. Of them, Gupta and Khara have relatively longer tenures left with the bank; both Kumar and Sriram are due to retire in 2018.

Bhattacharya will complete her four-year term on October 6.

Appointed in 2013, as the bank’s first woman chief, she got a one-year extension in October 2016 as SBI was to merge its associate banks and Bharatiya Mahila Bank (BMB) with itself. The chairman’s post now assumes more significance, as the bank’s merger with six other entities has taken it into the league of top 50 banks globally in terms of assets.

State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur (SBBJ), State Bank of Hyderabad (SBH), State Bank of Mysore (SBM), State Bank of Patiala (SBP) and State Bank of Travancore (SBT), besides BMB, merged with SBI with effect from April 1. The process of integration would at least take a year. The government had in February approved the merger of these five associate banks with SBI. Later in March, the Cabinet approved the merger of BMB as well.

SBI first merged State Bank of Saurashtra with itself in 2008. Two years later, State Bank of Indore was merged.

For the fourth quarter ended March 2017, the bank reported more than doubling of its net profit on the back of increased lending and reduction in provisioning for bad loans. The net profit of the bank on standalone basis rose to Rs 2,814.82 crore for the March quarter as against Rs 1,263.81 crore in the same period of the previous financial year 2015-16.

For FY17, the net profit of the bank improved by 5.36 per cent to Rs 10,484 crore as against Rs 9,951 crore in the previous financial year.