SBI's Dinesh Khara era ends, his successor CS Setty has new challenges

With Dinesh Khara's legacy of stock market's love for State Bank of India, his successor CS Setty faces the task of sustaining this momentum while war for deposits continues on the banking turf

The systems and processes at India’s largest lender, the State Bank of India (SBI), are so rigid that no chairman can make more than a 10 per cent difference to the bank — either for better or worse. In statistics, this is known as standard deviation. Whether the boss is a great banker or an average one is, according to popular industry perception, immaterial.

Dinesh Kumar Khara, the low-profile Delhi School of Economics alumnus, has probably shattered this myth. SBI’s net profit over the last four years, between FY21 and FY24, has been Rs 1.63 trillion —