SEBI appoints BSE Chief Chauhan to helm the NSE

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has approved the appointment of Ashish Kumar Chauhan as the next CEO and Managing Director of the National Stock Exchange (NSE). He succeeds Vikram Limaye, whose five-year term expired in July 2022. Chauhan will likely get an initial five-year tenure at the NSE. Chauhan, currently the CEO and MD of Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), is serving his second, five-year term with the BSE. His BSE tenure is scheduled to terminate in November 2022, and speculations are on to understand if Chauhan will join the NSE immediately or after the end of his BSE tenure. Chauhan’s key challenge would be to manage legacy regulatory issues and ensure that NSE maintains its control. Chauhan is considered one of the NSE founders and worked with the institution from 1992-2000. Under his wings, India got its first fully automated screen-based trading system, and NSE gained the first commercial satellite communications network. Chauhan began his illustrious career path with IDBI as a banker in 1991 and is considered the father of modern financial derivatives in India. Between 1993 and 2000, Chauhan worked meticulously to develop NSE’s derivatives segment as the primary volume driver. Along with a five-member team, Chauhan was instrumental in founding the NSE in 1993 and created NSE’s trading infrastructure and the Nifty Index. In 2000, he joined the Reliance group and became CEO of the Mumbai Indians IPL team during its foundational years. He is an alum of IIT Mumbai and the IIM Kolkata and has been a visiting professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.

Atul Singh

Raymond ropes in FMCG veteran as EVP

Raymond Group appoints former Coca-Cola India Pvt. Ltd.’s veteran Atul Singh as its Executive Vice Chairman. While recommending Singh’s appointment, Raymond’s nomination and remuneration committee notified that it is subject to necessary regulatory clearances. Onboarding Singh is a significant step by the Raymond Group in building a future-ready organization. He is expected to contribute and chart out a growth path for the Raymond group and enable shareholder value creation. Singh brings over 35 years of leadership acumen, heading multi-billion-dollar businesses across diverse geographies. He spent nearly 20 years with the Coca-Cola company helming various senior leadership positions. He was the Chairman for Asia-Pacific, in his final role with the company, managing their business across 25 countries. Before his stint with Coca-Cola, Singh was associated with the FMCG major, Colgate-Palmolive (CP), for around a decade and held several critical company roles globally. His last stint with CP was that of Country Manager for Nigeria.

Rajarshi Gupta

Rajarshi Gupta takes over as MD, ONGC Videsh

Rajarshi Gupta takes charge as the Managing Director of ONGC Videsh Ltd, the overseas investment arm of state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC). He has been recommended as per the purview of the Public Enterprise Selection Board (PESB) and replaced Alok Gupta, who was superannuated as the MD of ONGC Videsh. With 33 years of prolific experience in the sector, he brings over wide-ranging experience across managerial, supervisory, and strategic planning capacities for ONGC and ONGC’s domestic and international operations. Before being inducted into his most recent role, Gupta was ONGC’s Executive Director - Chief of Corporate Strategy and Planning, having spent 13 years of his career with ONGC Videsh (2006-2019). He set up the Geological & Geophysical Centre of Excellence in Houston as a vital part of his ONGC Videsh contributions. He was responsible for framing ONGC’s long-term vision document, the Perspective Plan 2030. He is an alum of NIT Rourkela and a Gold Medallist in MBA (International Business) from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade.

Deepak Padaki

Deepak Padaki quits Infosys

Infosys veteran Deepak Padaki, EVP, Strategy & Chief Risk Officer, and Group Head of strategy and M&A has quit the firm and relinquished his three-decade-long association with the IT major. His long career standing includes garnering next-generation technologies such as speech recognition-based solutions. In 2003-2004, he navigated Infosys’ telecommunications business in Europe. Padaki steered M&A from 2008 and was responsible for several M&As in recent years, including that of WongDoody, Brilliant Basics, Simplus, Fluido (Salesforce partner), and GuideVision (ServiceNow partner) which Infosys acquired to step up its digital services offerings. Padaki was a key player in 2013-14, managing several organisational change initiatives. As the head of the company’s M&A function, he masterminded multiple transactions. He helped acquire a large European consulting company, a North American insurance software platform company, a UK-based design-services company, and an Australian consulting company. His team led Infosys’s strategic partnership with Stater, the wholly owned subsidiary of Dutch lender ABN Amro Bank, which has been pegged at $850 million over five years. He began his Infosys journey in 1992 as a software developer and soon managed Infosys’s telecommunication projects in the US and Canada. Deepak holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science from the University of Mysore.

Ayesha Ghosh

Ayesha Ghosh joins Wieden+Kennedy India, as MD

Wieden+Kennedy has appointed Ayesha Ghosh as the Managing Director, India. To be based out of Mumbai, Ayesha will partner with Santosh Padhi, CCO, Wieden+Kennedy, India. The company is an independent global advertising agency known for its Nike campaigns. Before joining Wieden, she was the CEO of Taproot Dentsu. She joined Dentsu in 2016 as General Manager and is known to have significantly contributed to its business growth and profitability, built the agency’s design components, and shaped it up strategically. She was promoted to the CEO of Taproot Dentsu in 2021. Before joining Dentsu, she had a prior stint with Contract Advertising for around 10 years. Before Contract Advertising, she held permanent roles across the industry, including Grey Worldwide, Trikaya Grey, and PSL McCann Erickson. She is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Mass Communications and Miranda House, Delhi.

Kiran Antony

Kiran Antony joins Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Kiran Antony joins Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) as the Lead of digital communication and consumer engagement. Before joining BMGF, he was the digital and e-commerce lead at Bose Corporation. He is considered an astute planner and strategist with expertise in devising marketing activities for business growth accelerations and large-scale rollout of marketing campaigns for sales objectives. He is well versed in brand management, marketing and communication, retailing, marketing operations, trade marketing, media planning, public relation, sales advertising, and promotions across FMCGs and durable consumer organisations. His previous stints also include leadership positions with IFB and Whirpool Corporation. He has contributed significantly to the Coca-Cola Company, Eid Parry (India), and Nucleus Planet Event Management. An alumnus of the Coimbatore Institute of Technology and the Bharathiar University.

Dipashree Das

Former Netflix Exec to head Amazon’s Partner Marketing

Dipashree Das takes over the reins as Amazon’s Head of Partner Marketing, APAC & ANZ, and AmazonFuse, the vertical that manages Amazon’s consumer subscription services via strategic partnerships, including Prime Video, Prime, and Amazon Music, Audible, and Kindle. Dipashree has relinquished her role as the Content and Brand Marketing Lead with Netflix and announced via her social media post that she would be moving out of the streaming platform after a six-year stint in favour of “an APAC role with an entertainment company.” Based in Mumbai, she was part of Netflix’s marketing team and led marketing functions for its business-critical films portfolio. Her previous corporate stints include diverse positions with Channel News Asia, Oak3 Films, Singtel, NDTV, and Unilever. She led marketing roles with Singtel and Channel NewsAsia in Singapore. She is an alum of the Harvard Business School online programme and Lady Shri Ram College for Women.

Pawan Sarda

Pawan Sarda quits Future Group

Pawan Sarda quits the Future group and has joined Wingreens, a farmto-retail brand, as the group chief marketing officer (CMO) and Head of D2C (direct to consumer). Before joining Wingreens, Sarda has had a long stint with the Future group, where he was group CMO for digital, marketing, and e-commerce business at shop.bigbazaar.com. He was inducted into the Future Group as the CMO for Home Solutions Retail India (HSRIL) and eventually elevated as the CMO for Big Bazaar in 2010. He strategically led the retail brand’s long-term business goals. The former Future Group stalwart was responsible for strategies and managed group-wide digital and marketing initiatives, including digital commerce for all of Future group’s merchandising formats. The retail strongman brings 23 years of experience, having worked for Pantaloon Retail India for nearly seven years. Before he joined the Kishore Biyani-led Future enterprise, Sarda had a successful run with Tata Housing and Development Company as the Head of marketing and product development for Tata Value Homes. Wingreens is a farm-to-retail company and has acquired cold-pressed juice brand RAW Pressery. It recently acquired the Coimbatore-based cereal brand Monsoon Harvest. Wingreens also sells its popular range of dips and spreads.

Anjana Ghosh

Bisleri’s Director of Marketing quits

Anjana Ghosh, Director- Marketing, Bisleri, has quit after a 16 years stint with the company. While her next move is unknown, she wishes to start value addition by building another brand, likely in the consumer goods sector. Anjana brought innovation and planning to Bisleri’s brand transition from Blue to Aqua Green in 2006 and also managed brand planning. She joined Bisleri in 2006 as Deputy General Manager, Sales, and Marketing, was elevated as the General Manager within three years, and eventually was promoted as the Director of the bottled water brand. She has been supporting start-ups free of cost and for the past 2-3 years, has been involved in several pioneering projects and also into the brand’s latest foray into the e-commerce sector. She is involved in Bisleri’s sustainability and plastic recycling initiatives. She is said to have strategically and aggressively grown brand Bisleri by utilising market penetration and a combination of backward and forward integration. She had zeroed in on market penetration, revamping, and restructuring of the sales teams to increase its bottling units as her winning strategy.