Sanjay Nayar
CEO, City Group India
As CEO for Citigroup-India, and the Area Head for Citigroup operations in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, Sanjay Nayar doesn’t have any proper work schedule. It is a 24-hour job and his endeavor is to ensure the leading position of the Citibank. A Mechanical Engineer from Delhi University, he earned his MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad. He also worked as a Design Engineer in the UK before joining Citigroup in 1985.
He worked in the Fixed Income Group across Salomon Smith Barney (SSB) and Citicorp Securities, and was responsible for the emerging markets business in SSB New York for five years covering fixed income currencies and derivatives. He was responsible for the post-merger integration of Citibank and Salomon Smith investor businesses in New York (1998) for Citibank and Travelers Group. His tenure in Citibank has seen him take up various assignments in Citigroup Capital Markets worldwide in London (1994-96), and New York (1996-2001), before being posted to India in October 2001, a country where Citibank has an over a hundred years of history.
Prior to that, he was in London for three years heading the Emerging Markets Equities for Citibank London. He was also the global sales head for Fixed Income Emerging Markets Business at Salomon Smith Barney. As CEO of Citibank India, Nayar has to oversee the group’s key businesses which consist of consumer banking, corporate & investment banking, a financial services BPO-eServe, the venture capital businesses, and the local private bank.
It was during his tenure that Citigroup IT Operations & Solutions Ltd (CITOS), a Citigroup company, opened a Global IT center in Malad. CITOS, which provides critical technology infrastructure support, also develops and deploys strategic software applications for Citigroup entities worldwide.
Under his leadership and guidance, Citibank has consolidated its position to become the leading international bank in the subcontinent. He believes in “the capacity to achieve the impossible”. With this motto, he directed initiatives across the corporate, treasury and capital market activities. It might look tough but it is not so for him. After all, he never tires of saying, “In today’s competitive world, there are many times when one feels dejected with a single failure, but as did the spider in King Bruce’s prison; try, try and try again till you succeed. That is what an achiever does.”