Vikram Pandit

50

India (Born), United States of America (Residence)

Finance

CEO of Citigroup

Vikram Pandit was born to a moderately affluent family in Nagpur, India. After completing schooling from Dadar Parsee Youths Assembly High School, he moved to United States to attend college at Columbia University. He graduated in Electrical engineering and after completing his masters in the same field, he switched his field of study and earned a PhD in Finance in 1986. He entered the Finance sector on the advice of a college professor, an advice that would go a long way into giving rise to a financial wizard.

After completing his doctorate, Vikram Pandit took up the post of a junior professor at Indiana University, Bloomington. He then joined the Morgan Stanley company, where as a head of institutional securities division, he pushed the company into more electronic trading and helped build the firm's prime brokerage services that cater to hedge funds. He continued heading the institutional security business at Morgan Stanley till 2005, after which he resigned to form his own company, Old Lane. This new start-up met with such success that Citigroup expressed their desire to get Pandit under their wings by offering $800 million to buy Old Lane.

During the same period, Citigroup was going through a rough patch with their exposure to sub-prime mortgage securities at a scary $55 billion prompting the then CEO Charles Prince to step down. Citigroup were in the look-out for a new CEO.

With his success with Old Lane and Morgan Stanley, Vikram Pandit was seen as a dark horse who could turn around the fortunes of Citigroup – which he is admirably attempting to do.

With a combination of deep executive experience and a long history as a strategic thinker, Vikram Pandit has earned a reputation as one of the most respected men in the financial services industry. He has a solid academic background and an equally strong strategic brain.

Vikram Pandit is impressively forthright with his plans for the ailing Citigroup. He says, “I will undertake an objective and dispassionate review of all the businesses, individually and in aggregate, to make sure we are properly positioned for the future”.

• Citigroup makes an offer of $800 million to acquire his company Old Lane.

• Pandit becomes the Investment Banking head for Citigroup.

• Pandit gets appointed as the CEO of Citigroup, the worlds largest financial institution.