Salesforce India hires ex-SBI chief Bhattacharya as CEO

The US-headquartered cloud-based customer relationship management software provider Salesforce has appointed Arundhati Bhattacharya, the past chairman of State Bank of India, as the chairperson and chief executive of its India operations, say sources aware of the development.

Bhattacharya, 64, will be based in Mumbai and will join Salesforce India on April 20 and will lead its growth and expansion across the market, the sources told PTI.

She will report to Ulrik Nehammer, the general manager for Asia Pacific region.

While Salesforce could not be reached for confirmation, Bhattacharya refused to comment saying the matter is private.

Bhattacharya was the first woman to lead the more than two centuries-old State Bank of India, which controls over a quarter of the nation's banking system.

She retired in 2017 after a one-year extension, spending four decades in various roles and then moved onto the international payment platform Swift India as its chairman, a position she still occupies.

Under Bhattacharya, SBI has grown exponentially partly by the merger of the five associate banks and partly because of a good growth environment.

The bank has also undergone drastic changes under her chairmanship by technology adoption under her watch which also saw the launch of the bank's digital banking platform Yono.

Salesforce provides an array of cloud storage and digital services to clients in India, which it sees as a one of its fastest growing markets.

Salesforce will create over 5 lakh jobs and around USD 67 billion in new business revenue in India through 2024, according to a 2019 report by International Data Corporation, while the domestic cloud application market is slated to grow 21 per cent to over USD 1.4 billion in 2020, according to a recent Gartner report.