Thursday, December 13, 2007

Vikram Pandit- Proud of India


Vikram Pandit is the current CEO of Citigroup.
Pandit worked for Morgan Stanley for two decades and was the President and Chief Operating Officer of the Institutional Securities and Investment Banking Group at Morgan Stanley where he was responsible for the overall management of the group and focused on the trading, sales and infrastructure aspects of the business (2000-2005). Before that, he served as the managing director and head of the Worldwide Institutional Equities Division (1994-2000), and as the managing director and head of the US Equity Syndicate (1990-1994) for Morgan Stanley. Pandit left Morgan Stanley with a few colleagues to start a hedge fund Old Lane Partners, which Citigroup bought in 2007 for $800 million.
Pandit serves on the boards of Columbia University, Columbia Business School, the Indian School of Business and The Trinity School. He is a former board member of NASDAQ (2000-2003), the New York City Investment Fund, and the American India Foundation.
On December 11, 2007, Pandit was named the new CEO of Citigroup, replacing interim-CEO Sir Winfried Bischoff. Pandit is the effective successor to Chuck Prince who resigned in November 2007 due to unexpectedly poor 3rd quarter performance, mainly due to CDO and MBS related losses.

[edit] Early Life and Education
Vikram Pandit was born in Nagpur, Maharashtra, India to a moderately affluent Marathi Deshastha Brahmin family. At the age of 16, he moved to the United States to attend college at Columbia University. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering in 1976 and 1977 respectively, and later earned a Ph.D. in Finance in 1986.[2]
50-year-old Pandit is the second Indian to become CEO of a major American financial institution (after Ramani Ayer, CEO of Hartford Financial Services Group). He is a trustee at Columbia University. He was a junior finance professor at Indiana University Bloomington in the mid-1980s before joining Morgan Stanley. As head of Morgan Stanley's institutional-securities division from 1994 to 2000, he pushed the company into more electronic trading and helped build the firm's prime brokerage services that cater to hedge funds. He led the institutional-securities business from 2000 until March 2005.
Pandit and his wife Swati reside at Central Park West and 81st Street. The apartment was purchased from the late actor Tony Randall for $17.85 million in September 2007. The 10-room apartment has 20 windows facing Central Park.

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