Tata Group Chairman N Chandrasekaran announced a key recruitment at holding company Tata Sons on 22
nd May 2017, of veteran investment banker Saurabh Agrawal as group chief financial officer.
Agrawal, who will join from July, is currently the head of strategy with the Aditya Birla Group.
As group CFO at Tata Sons, he will have to focus on bringing back some of the loss-making businesses on track. Agrawal was instrumental in handling the Idea-Vodafone merger deal, as well as the Grasim-Aditya Birla Nuvo merger for the Birla entity.
It will be the second big appointment by Chandrasekaran, after that of Ankur Verma, former managing director of investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who joined Tata Group in March.
Prior to the Birla job, Saurabh Agrawal was heading corporate finance at Standard Chartered Bank in India and South Asia.
He had also been the head of investment banking at DSP Merrill Lynch, where he worked with Chandrasekaran on Tata Consultancy Services’ initial public offer of equity in 2004, beside later acquisitions.
Agrawal brings deep capital markets knowledge and valuable cross-industry experience to this critical leadership role in the Tata Group.
Saurabh Agrawal is a graduate of IIT Roorkee, with a post-graduate management degree from IIM Calcutta.
One of the stated complaints of Tata Group patriarch Ratan Tata against former Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry was that the latter had not appointed a group CFO after Ishaat Hussain retired as Tata Sons’ finance director in 2012.
The group CFO position is important and considered a second link between Tata Sons and its subsidiaries, after the chairman.
The group CFO will also have to decide on job cuts ensure that Tata Sons gives enough dividends to Tata Trusts, which own 66 per cent stake in the company.
