Rana Ashutosh Kumar Singh
Managing Director
State Bank of India
PGEMP Batch 22 | Year: 2009-2011
2009: Asst. General Manager (Overseas Expansion), International Banking Group, State Bank of India
The State Bank of India was not big in retail banking abroad. Our operations were almost limited to remittances of diaspora, financing Indian companies going abroad to set up their facilities, and facilitating trade finance between India and other countries with which India deals. Although SBI was the oldest and biggest bank in India, we were hardly doing retail banking internationally.
SBI decided to experiment with retail in 2008 and selected Singapore as a pilot project. It worked, and SBI established retail banking in Canada and the USA, and subsequently in Bahrain. So, in a way, the international retail banking of SBI benefited from my capstone project. My project was ranked number one in my batch.
These are excerpts from his interview featured in the PGEMP Impact Book (January 2025)