Meet the veteran banker presiding over BharatPe’s cleanup

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Editor's note: So far in the BharatPe saga, you’ve heard of everyone. Bad boy co-founder Ashneer Grover. The right-hand man, CEO Suhail Sameer. Not so vigilant venture capital investors suddenly awakened by a streak of activism. And a term that has been thrown around a lot—the board. The one person who has avoided a lot of attention, almost hidden in plain sight, is Rajnish Kumar.  The former chairman of State Bank of India is highly respected in banking and industry circles, having overseen the country’s largest bank during the worst banking crisis in history. It was during his tenure that the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code came into effect and SBI led the debt resolution process of some of India’s biggest corporate defaulters. Under Kumar, SBI’s bad loan book steadily declined from Rs 2.23 lakh crore as of March 2018 to Rs 1.3 lakh crore by June 2020.  He joined SBI in 1980 as a probationary officer and rose up the ranks. From running the bank’s UK operations, the project finance division, compliance and risk departments and then retail and digital banking verticals, …