An Indian Woman Leader turning Global Heads
Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairman & CEO, Salesforce India at Salesforce and the former chairman of SBI, is a woman with super wings who knows to turn the tables when it comes to finances. Bhattacharya joined SBI in 1977 as a Probationary Officer (PO), and since then she has risen and risen through the ranks to become the first-ever woman Chairman of this iconic institution. Under her stewardship, the bank has undergone a complete transformation. She played an instrumental role in the launch of SBI Mobile Banking. The digitalization of its banking services turned out to be a winning stroke for this 200-year-old financial institution that was slowly but surely losing its grip on the ground!
Bhattacharya’s initiatives in revamping the old traditional way of banking have been acknowledged by the industry as path-breaking. Her work in the area of Human Resources laid special focus on women and “challenged”. Under her leadership, the bank was named as one of India’s top 3 Best Places to work in India by leading Global Job site ‘Indeed’. She also engineered the merger of SI with its six Associate banks creating an entity three times the size of its nearest competitor. Bhattacharya has got many titles to her crown. Forbes magazine ranked her 25th in their list of “Most Powerful Women in the World” and 5th in “The Most Powerful Women in Finance” in 2016. She has also featured in the Fortune List of Top 50 globally most powerful women in business and ranked among the top 5 in the Asia-Pacific region. Bhattacharya made it to the top 100 Global Thinkers in 2014 ranked by Foreign Policy Magazine.
She has been ranked 26th in the fourth edition of Fortune’s World 50 Greatest Leaders list, becoming the only Indian corporate leader to be featured in the list. Arundhati Bhattacharya has stamped her imprint on the financial world not just in India but also globally. Her wealth of experience and unparalleled expertise makes her one of the most soughtafter financial leaders by global companies.
Currently, the veteran banker is roped by the US-based software major, Salesforce to handle and oversee it’s India expansions. Salesforce is one of the largest cloud CRM companies that is spreading the use of cloudbased software and pioneered the concept of software-as-a-service revolution. With its offices already cemented across Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Gurugram, and Mumbai, Salesforce is looking for a positive and aggressive growth in the country of rich potential and Arundhati Bhattacharya seems like the perfect pilot to navigate their aspirational growth.
