The list of Indians at the very top of multinational companies continues to grow larger.
Pam Kaur has been appointed the Chief Financial Officer at HSBC. Kaur replaces Georges Elhedery, who vacated the post after taking over the reins as CEO earlier this year. With the appointment, Pam Kaur has become the bank’s first woman CFO in its 160-year history.
“We had a strong bench of internal and external candidates to choose from, and Pam was the exceptional candidate to recommend to the Board,” current CFO Georges Elhedery said on Kaur’s appointment.
Pam Kaur has her roots in India. She had completed her B.Com and MBA from Punjab University. Her career then spanned a list of the biggest names in the banking and finance space. She had begun her career with EY as a Chartered Accountant in 1986. She then joined the Citi Group in 1990, and rose through the ranks, finally becoming the company’s Chief Compliance Officer in 2005. Kaur then spent a year with Lloyds Banking Group as its head of Compliance and Anti-Money Laundering. She followed it up with a stint with Royal Bank of Scotland and left in 2010 as its Chief Financial Officer and the Chief Operations Officer of its Restructuring and Risk Division. Kaur then joined Deutsche Bank in 2011 before joining HSBC in 2013.
In HSBC, she rose up the ranks once more. She’d joined as the Group Head of Internal Audit, and became its head of Wholesale Market and Credit Risk in 2019. In 2020, she became the bank’s Chief Risk Officer, and in 2021 became the Group’s Chief Risk and Compliance Officer. She’s now been appointed as the bank’s Chief Financial Officer.
It’s a pretty remarkable journey to go from Punjab to being the CFO of a 160-year-old British bank headquartered in Shanghai and Hong Kong, but Kaur isn’t the only Indian who’s made it big in the financial space. The current CEO of Barclays, C.S. Venkatakrishnan, is of Indian origin, as is the current CEO of DBS Bank, Piyush Gupta. Meanwhile Bharat Masrani is the CEO of the US-based TD Bank, and Ajay Banga is the CEO of Mastercard. There’s no shortage of Indian-origin top executives in the world of tech, but there’s now a growing tribe of these executives in the world of finance as well.