SBI's first Woman Chief

The government cleared the elevation of Arundhati Bhattacharya as the chairperson of State Bank of India — the first woman chief of the country’s largest lender — succeeding Pratip Chaudhuri, who had retired on September 30.
Bhattacharya, 57, is the bank’s 24th chairperson and has a two-and-a-half-year term. Recently, the government had promoted her to the post of managing director and chief financial offer by the bank. She was among the four contenders who were interviewed for the top job. The others were SBI’s MDs — Hemant Contractor, A Krishna Kumar and S Viswanathan.
Her biggest challenge will be to reduce the share of bad loans, which is little over 5% of the total loan book. Also, she will have to identify an associate bank to merge with SBI. Former chairman Chaudhuri had said he would prefer the new management to decide on the merger of associate banks. The bank’s gross non-performing assets (NPA) ratio stood at 5.56% as on June 30, 2013, compared with 4.75% as on March 31, 2013, and 4.99% as on June 30, 2012. During the same quarter, provisions and contingencies rose 16.67% year-on-year to . 2,865 crore. Bhattacharya joined SBI in 1977 as a probationary officer and during her career of 36 years, she had worked across the banking spectrum: from chief general manager in charge of the Bangalore circle to CGM in charge of new businesses. She became the deputy MD of SBI Capital Markets, the bank’s investment banking arm.
She also had a stint with SBI’s New York office, where she was in charge of branch performance, external audit and correspondent relations.