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India faces a shortage of CEOs at home

By Sohail Khan 17 September 2026, 7:32 am

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Business News›Industry›Banking/Finance›Banking›India supplies Wall Street with CEOs but has a shortage at home

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India supplies Wall Street with CEOs but has a shortage at home
Synopsis

India’s biggest private banks are finding it increasingly difficult to identify executives with the breadth of experience needed to lead large, complex institutions. HDFC Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank’s CEO searches have highlighted a surprisingly narrow talent pool, as regulatory requirements, limited succession pipelines and competing financial sectors constrain potential candidates.

HDFC Bank CEO race: Who could be in the running to succeed Sashidhar Jagdishan? — India has no shortage of banking talent, but a limited pool of enterprise-level executives, regulatory constraints and weak succession pipelines are making CEO searches at the country’s largest private banks increasingly challenging.

Indian-born bankers have led global financial giants from Deutsche Bank AG and Citigroup Inc. to Barclays Plc. Yet at home, the country’s lenders can face a string of challenges finding executives for the top job.

The subject of succession has been in sharp focus with India’s largest private bank — HDFC Bank Ltd. — hunting for a new chief executive officer after its current boss decided against seeking an extension. Another financial heavyweight, Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd., is on its second CEO search in three years. Neither had a clear successor waiting in the wings, setting the stage for a complex hunt.

Also read: HDFC CEO race: One insider, one outsider in contention for the top job

Private-sector banks looking for potential C-suite talent are often circling the same pool of candidates in India, with a handful of names recurring across searches, according to more than a dozen senior executives, regulators, board members, bankers and recruiters interviewed by Bloomberg News. India has an abundance of banking talent, yet the bench of executives with the breadth of experience to run a large institution is surprisingly thin, they said.

The stakes are high at home and overseas. India’s economic ascent has transformed what was once a sleepy banking industry into a thriving sector that handles loans worth more than $2 trillion. HDFC alone has a market value of about $116 billion. Global funds from Franklin Templeton Inc. to Vanguard and Blackrock Inc. hold its stock, which has tumbled more than 27% in 2026 given the uncertainty at the top. That compares with a nearly 6% drop in the broader Nifty Bank index.

The biggest banks don’t lack qualified candidates. But when boards look for executives with experience across businesses, along with the ability to manage institutions of enormous scale and the credentials needed for regulatory approval, the field can narrow quickly.

“A CEO search for one of India’s top private banks might start with around 20 candidates, but by the time it reaches the nomination committee it can narrow down to less than five, and those names would be pretty much the same across the top five banks,” said Leena Rajput, a Korn Ferry senior client partner who has worked on several high-profile bank CEO searches in India.

A recent succession wave has further depleted the pool. Seventeen of 30 leading private-sector banks and non-bank lenders changed CEOs in the 30 months through June 2026, according to a Spencer Stuart study. Almost 60% of those appointments were external hires.

“Many potential candidates have already moved into CEO roles and aren’t likely to move again soon,” Ritu Kochhar, who leads Spencer Stuart’s India business.

At HDFC, three-decade veteran Sashidhar Jagdishan abruptly announced plans to step down on Aug. 29, leaving the board under two months to name a new CEO. Its stock rose earlier this week after it submitted the names of two candidates to India’s central bank for the position of chief executive officer.

HDFC’s “board has fast-tracked the process for selection and appointment of Mr. Jagdishan’s successor well within time,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. Kotak has also submitted the names of CEO candidates to the regulator, according to media reports. It didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Reserve Bank of India can approve one of the two candidates or ask the bank for other names. The regulator had pushed back on Kotak’s leadership preference in 2023, adding another element of uncertainty to any CEO hunt.

That shows how India’s candidate shortage is complicated by regulatory requirements. Private bank CEOs are subject to regulatory approval as well as age and tenure limits, meaning boards must find candidates who satisfy both commercial demands and the central bank’s expectations on governance.

Those safeguards are intended to strengthen governance and make sure a single executive doesn’t stay at the top of a bank for too long. They also mean boards need candidates who can clear a regulatory test as well as a commercial one. The RBI didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The complexities are a contrast with some of the world’s largest institutions. At JPMorgan Chase & Co., Troy Rohrbaugh and Doug Petno have been named co-presidents, setting up the pair as Jamie Dimon’s most likely successors.

“We have two exceptional co-presidents,” Dimon said on a July call with analysts. “I’m wholly confident that if I was hit by a truck, which is not my preference, we would be fine.”

Recruiters point to myriad problems across the industry in India: Long-serving CEOs have sometimes meant that there are fewer opportunities for internal executives to develop. Top performers at Indian universities have decamped to Western schools for decades. And as India has boomed, local fintechs, non-banking lenders and wealth managers have offered alternative career paths.

For India, it’s more than just an HR problem. A thin pool has the potential to make searches slower and less predictable. “Investors are demanding a risk premium from banks that don’t have a clear succession pipeline in place,” said Seshadri Sen, Emkay Global’s head of research.

Also read: HDFC Bank submits two names to RBI for CEO post, strengthens board-level leadership

Kotak’s current CEO Ashok Vaswani — a former Citigroup and Barclays executive — was himself brought in from overseas in 2024 after founder Uday Kotak stepped aside following a period of friction with the regulator. The bank has already lost some senior executives to other firms or industries in recent years.

In earlier decades, Citigroup in India and ICICI Bank Ltd. produced generations of executives who went on to lead lenders and other financial firms.

Citigroup was led globally by Vikram Pandit and Barclays also currently has an Indian-born CEO.

But running a major Indian lender now requires command of everything from credit and compliance to cyber risk and artificial intelligence. Srinath Sridharan, a corporate adviser who has been involved in several CEO successions, says India has plenty of accomplished bankers, but there is a shortage of executives who have been deliberately prepared to run an entire institution.

“Banks have built exceptional specialists, but relatively fewer enterprise leaders,” he said. “Leadership development has often been incidental rather than institutionalized.”

One former bank executive recalls running a major home-loan business in his mid thirties. He wanted to become a CEO but concluded that the incumbent was likely to remain in place for years. When an opportunity arose outside traditional banking to lead from the top, he left because he wanted an opportunity to lead.

Sanjay Nayar, a former CEO of Citigroup’s India business, said preparing for succession there was a formal and continuous part of running a business rather than something triggered by an impending departure.

“At Citi, I always had a slate of four potential successors,” Nayar said. That structure also gave ambitious executives something to aim for. “In a foreign bank, you can move up the chain, into a regional role, a global role, or elsewhere,” he said. “Where does the Indian CEO go?”

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