OM PRAKASH BHATT

CHAIRMAN OF SBI
DATE OF BIRTH 7th MARCH,1951
EDUCATION QUALIFICATION - MASTER OF ARTS(ENGLISH)
BEGINNING – Career started with SBI as probationary officer
Mr. O.P. Bhatt started his banking career as a Probationary Officer with State Bank of India in 1972. Mr. O.P. Bhatt has, during his long career of 36 years with SBI, held several important assignments in India and abroad including stints at the Bank’s London and Washington Offices. He was the Project Coordinator for the Bank’s computerization project from where he moved on to Regional Manager at Jaipur and then as Executive Secretary to the then Chairman of the SBI Group. After his return from Washington, Mr. Bhatt has held a number of critical assignments first as General Manager at Lucknow, later as Chief General Manager of the Bank’s North East Circle and then as Managing Director of State Bank of Travancore, a subsidiary of the State Bank of India.
As Chairman, Mr. Bhatt is not only the Chief Executive of India's largest
commercial bank, he is also the Head of the entire State Bank Group which consists of 8 domestic and 5 international banking subsidiaries, besides 10 nonbanking subsidiaries, and 2 Joint Ventures. Besides chairing these companies, Mr. Bhatt is also the Chairman of the Banking & Financial Institutions Committee of FICCI, Director on the board of several other companies like EXIM Bank and GIC and a member of the Boards of ICRIER, XLRI, IBPS, IDRBT, KVIC and National Co-operative Development Corporation. Mr. Bhatt took over the reigns of the State Bank of India at its most critical and challenging time. The process of liberalization and globalisation of the Indian economy had already begun, bringing with it both opportunities and threats. The private sector banks had begun to flourish in the Indian banking
industry, providing unprecedented competition to public sector banks like State Bank. Globalisation had also brought with it critical issues of risk management and capital adequacy. On the other hand, with the economy growing like never before, and with State Bank of India having the largest network of branches in the country and a strong IT platform already in place, Mr. Bhatt felt that the Bank was at the threshold of its "golden period". With his deep knowledge of the market, both domestic and international, his close grasp of IT related issues, his hands-on approach to execution, and his proven ability to plan and strategise, Mr. Bhatt began at SBI, a process of consolidating the Bank's strengths, innovating new products to suit today's market, and taking effective
steps to ensure that technology, human resources and business processes are harnessed towards expansion and deeper penetration of the market, both domestic and foreign.

Mr. Bhatt has ushered in a Transformation Exercise at SBI which began
with the Top Management and has been taken right down to the grass root level. ‘Parivartan’ – a change management capsule programme, which was the brainchild of Mr. Bhatt and is hailed by the industry, as the largest ever programme of its kind, covered 1,30,000 employees of SBI in 100 days.


The Bank, under Mr. Bhatt, has made rapid strides during the past two years – arresting falling market share, rapid branch expansion – the Bank opened its 10,000th branch this year – the first Indian bank and only the second in the world to do so, and entering a number of new businesses. A testimony to this is the number of awards conferred on the Bank and on Mr. Bhatt including the “Banker of the Year” by Business Standard and CNN-IBN Indian of the Year for Business, both in 2007. The Bank has, under the aegis of Mr. Bhatt, steadily improved its Global ranking from 107 in 2006 to 70 in 2007 and 57 in 2008. The Bank’s ranking in the list of Fortune 500 companies has similarly moved up from 495 in 2006 to 380 in July 2008, and is, incidentally, the only
Indian bank in this list.