Arundhati Bhattacharya: from a bank PO exam to the top of SBI

Steel towns and a literature degree

Arundhati Bhattacharya was born in Kolkata on 18 March 1956 and spent her childhood in Bhilai and Bokaro, two towns built around steel plants. Her publisher's note on her memoir describes them as sleepy places where she never imagined she would one day lead India's largest bank.

She moved to Kolkata for college and took her bachelor's and master's degrees at Jadavpur University, studying English literature. Banking was not the plan. It was, in her own account, sheer chance that a friend told her about the probationary officers' entrance examination of the State Bank of India.

She applied, was selected, and joined SBI as a probationary officer in September 1977, at the age of 22.

Four decades inside one bank

A career in a public sector bank means transfers, and hers took her across the country and across departments. Her publisher describes a frequently transferable job and a career of four decades in many different roles inside the same bank.

It was not always easy. Her memoir describes breaking points when she nearly quit to balance her family's needs with the demands of a job that kept moving her around. She did not give up. Instead, her publisher notes, she treated every new posting as a new chapter of learning.

That habit of adapting carried her to the top. On 7 October 2013 she became chairman of the State Bank of India, the first woman to hold the post in the bank's history of more than two hundred years. She served until October 2017.

Leading SBI through hard years

Her four years in charge came when Indian banks were weighed down by bad loans. Under her leadership SBI worked through the crisis while becoming a more customer-focused and digital bank, and her human resources policies for employees, especially women, were later copied by other banks.

Forbes profiled her as the head of the country's largest bank at a difficult time, noting that she took a firm public line against large borrowers who refused to repay.

After retiring from SBI in 2017 she chaired SWIFT India, part of the global payments network. In 2020 Salesforce, the American cloud software company, hired her as chairperson and chief executive of Salesforce India, based in Mumbai. In January 2022 HarperCollins published her memoir, Indomitable: A Working Woman's Notes on Work, Life and Leadership.

In the memoir she takes readers from her childhood and schooling in the 1960s, through college in Kolkata, to her first days at SBI and the pressures of being a woman banker with a family in a job that kept moving her. Her publisher describes the book as candid and humble, written to encourage readers to take on challenges and break barriers.

The skills and habits that made the difference

The first was willingness to sit an exam she had not planned for. The PO test rewards reading, reasoning, arithmetic and general awareness, and a literature student with a clear head turned out to be well prepared for it.

The second was treating each transfer as training. A bank has many very different jobs inside it. By her own account she took each new assignment as a chapter in learning and adapting, and by the time she was chairman she understood the whole bank.

The third was humour and positivity under pressure. Her publisher describes her as candid, lucid and humble, and says she met her challenges with a smile. That outlook kept her in the job through the years when she thought of leaving.