Deloitte India to get new CEO
Photo : BCCL
Deloitte India has started the process to elect its new CEO, who will replace N Venkatram and get a four-year term starting April 1, 2023. Two senior partners, Rohit Mahajan , head of risk advisory, and Romal Shetty , head of consulting, are said to be in the race for the role for which they will need the vote of confidence of the other partners.
Venkatram has been at the helm for eight years. The firm is in the process of finalising the committees that will oversee the election process.
Every four years, top firms, including Deloitte, PwC, and KPMG in India, run an election process to select their country head.
For Deloitte, the process is a little more complicated than for the other two firms. “The firm will first appoint a selection and nomination committee that will include some of the old and respected Deloitte executives. These executives will then one by one interact with all the Indian partners,” ET reported, citing a source.
Insiders say that 5-6 top leaders who are eligible will be considered by the nomination committee for the top job.
The committee’s main purpose is to gauge what the India partners think of the potential country leader for the firm.
These partners can either suggest a name or can also pitch their own name to the committee.
“The committee would then again go to all the partners with the names and try to form a consensus. When that is reached, the new India head is announced,” the person said. In most cases, partners who want to run for election will begin gathering support from other partners well in advance.
Interestingly, both the candidates, Mahajan and Shetty, are old KPMG executives.
The new leader will have a 2-3 month transition period in which he will get a handover from the outgoing CEO. Venkat has transformed Deloitte from an audit-heavy firm into a multi-discipline powerhouse that’s now the fastest growing Big Four in India. During his tenure, he made two significant acquisitions that helped beef up Deloitte’s service portfolio.
In the biggest movement of people within the Big Four in India, he picked up more than 20 partners and 300 consultants from KPMG India in 2016 and in 2017 he scooped up BMR Advisors tax practice.
