It is never easy to quit your first job, especially when you have been with the same employer for 23 years.
Sanjay Nayar, Citi’s Chief Executive Officer for South Asia, too faced this tough choice when he received the offer to head global alternate investment manger Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co’s (KKR) India operations. At the end of December last year, KKR had assets under management of $53 billion, with $42 billion through private equity.
Not surprisingly, the 48-year-old MBA in finance from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad took several months to accept the offer.
While the announcement came early on Thursday, Nayar, who holds a bachelors degree in mechanical engineering from Delhi University, is expected to be in his present job for a while and only join KKR towards the end of January.
Apart from the challenge of starting something from scratch, ‘what next’ is a question that Nayar would have grappled with. After all, he has worked across various departments of a universal bank. Between 1985 and 1994, Nayar held various positions in corporate and transaction banking, including stints heading corporate finance and capital markets. He then moved to London as Citibank’s global head for emerging markets equities. From 1996 to 2002, Nayar headed Salomon Smith Barney’s emerging markets sales business in New York before he returned to India.
Over the last five-six years, Nayar has become nearly synonymous with Citi in India and has headed the bank which, during the last financial year, overtook Standard Chartered to become the largest foreign bank in the country.
His colleagues say that he was now completely in control of Citi’s operations in this part of the globe. During a recent interaction with Business Standard, Nayar pointed out that having done a stint as the CEO in the region for a significant period of time, he was seeing the results of the strategies he had implemented.
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In the wake of the global financial crisis and its impact on Indian banks and the capital markets, Citi had embarked on restructuring its Indian operations, which included the clubbing together of the middle offices to reduce duplication and also cut extra flab. In addition, the financial services giant is getting out of non-core areas like operating its business process outsourcing unit.
Citi is still in the midst of restructuring its non-banking finance company, CitiFinancial, which has piled up sticky assets due to the deteriorating economic environment.
Over the years, Nayar successfully mastered the art of fire-fighting and lobbied successfully to ensure that the Reserve Bank of India started issuing fresh branch licences to the bank. With the US authorities refusing to grant branch licences to State Bank of India and ICICI Bank, RBI had retaliated by stopping permission to Citi for opening new branches. So, it took some effort on Nayar’s part to convince not just the finance ministry, but to also ensure that the US authorities were prodded to issue licences to Indian banks.
How Nayar’s stature has grown in recent years can be gauged from the fact that the finance ministry roped him in while working out the capital infusion programme for SBI last year. And when the financial crisis broke out in September, Nayar was amongst the first to be called to Delhi to discuss matters.
In his new job, Nayar wants to ensure that KKR — which has so far done only two deals in India (and in both cases, Citi was associated either as an advisor or a co-investor) — is known not just as a private equity player but for the range of products it offers.
Nayar believes that his experience at Citi, which spanned various sectors and departments, and the contacts that he developed over the years are going to help him put KKR on a firm wicket in India.