Royal Bank of Scotland has hired senior Indian banker Devesh Kumar to fill a newly created position as head of equities for India as it continues to expand its business in the region, the UK bank said yesterday.
Kumar has more than 20 years of banking experience, including a combined 10 years building the equities businesses at ICICI Securities and Centrum Broking. Prior to that, he worked at ABN Amro, Daewoo Finance India, WI Carr and Unit Trust of India, primarily in research positions.
Kumar moves to RBS from Fortune Financial Services India, a Mumbai-listed brokerage, investment banking and portfolio management firm, which he joined in February 2010 as group CEO.
At RBS he will be responsible for cash equities, including research and sales, equity derivatives and equity financing in India. He will be based in Mumbai and will have a dual reporting line to Peter Irvine, who is head of Asia-Pacific equities, and to Ramit Bhasin, the head of markets for India.
“India is a core market for the RBS Group and we see huge growth potential here,” Bhasin said in a written statement. “[Kumar] will play a key role in our plan to make RBS a top 10 equities house in the market.”
The appointment also demonstrates the bank’s continued commitment to growing its equities business in the region, Irvine added.
Since it sold its retail and commercial banking business in India to HSBC in July last year (as part of a wider exit from these businesses across Asia) it has been focusing its efforts on its key business areas: wholesale and investment banking, transaction services and private banking.
In a statement issued at the time of the divestment, John McCormick, CEO of global banking and markets, which includes equities, noted that RBS’s client base in India after the sale is a more tightly defined group of large-scale sophisticated corporations, financial institutions and government institutions, and said the bank has been maintaining “a very close dialogue with these clients, delivering the full depth and breadth of [its] resources and capabilities to them, including balance sheet”.
The strengthening of its Indian equities business comes three months after the bank transferred 10-year RBS veteran Deepak Chokhani from corporate finance to its equity capital markets team in India to enhance its equities origination capacity in this market. Chokhani reports to Dilip Kadambi, who is head of ECM for India and since January also head of ECM for Southeast Asia.
When it released its 2010 earnings in February, RBS noted that it is now two years into its five-year plan to restore the group to good health and said it made “good progress” against its targets last year. This included a turnaround to an operating profit of £1.91 billion ($3.15 billion) from a loss of £6.1 billion in 2009, which it said reflected the recovery in markets and economic conditions, as well as the internal rebuilding process. The asset disposal and risk reduction efforts means the bank can now increasingly focus on strengthening its core businesses, group chairman Philip Hampton said in a letter to shareholders.
