Senior Vice President, Portfolio Profitability — Retail Banking

The mandate

A retail bank is reconsidering growth across customer segments whose reported margins obscure different capital demands, service costs and credit-risk characteristics. Business plans currently favour products with immediate accounting contribution without consistently examining the resources required to sustain them. The senior vice president will establish portfolio profitability as an ongoing strategic-finance discipline, helping executives compare choices without claiming authority over independent risk assessment or credit approval.

Employment is open-ended. An initial eighteen-month agenda will reconcile segment economics, establish a credible risk-adjusted return framework and embed it in strategic planning. Thirteen specialists form the team, with support from finance, risk and business data owners. Mumbai is the principal base, and branch or service-centre reviews will be used selectively to test cost attribution rather than assuming headquarters averages represent every customer segment.

The leader owns profitability methodology, strategic challenge and recommendations for resource allocation. Treasury supplies approved funding inputs and risk functions retain credit and capital interpretations. Changes to portfolio limits or strategic exit decisions require the designated committees. The role must make analytical disagreements visible, identifying when a favourable return reflects a genuine business advantage and when it is produced by an allocation assumption or incomplete view of servicing effort.

The durable outcome is a reconciled portfolio decision book that connects financial performance to capital, customer behaviour and operating requirements. It must support choices about growth pace, segment focus and capability spending rather than produce a league table executives can misinterpret as automatic direction. Regulatory reporting, loan sanctioning and model-risk approval are excluded; the SVP must nevertheless obtain qualified inputs and explain how uncertainty affects the financial recommendation.

What you will own

• Establish a segment profitability bridge that reconciles ledger contribution with funding, servicing and capital inputs, showing where approved assumptions materially change the interpretation of a business unit's apparent performance.
• Recommend portfolio resource allocation through comparable risk-adjusted scenarios, identifying which growth choices consume constrained capital or operating capacity and which evidence is required before endorsing a revised strategic plan.
• Challenge business forecasts that rely on favourable customer mix or loss assumptions, obtaining risk-owned inputs and recording sensitivity rather than substituting an unsupported finance estimate for independent credit judgement.
• Govern cost-attribution standards with operating managers, separating avoidable service demands from shared infrastructure and explaining how alternative treatments affect decisions without concealing the limits of the underlying data.
• Present executive portfolio papers that distinguish economic recommendation, policy constraint and unresolved analytical issue, ensuring that authorised committees can understand the consequence of each strategic alternative.
• Develop strategic-finance managers capable of defending methodology, collaborating with risk and treasury and revising conclusions when better evidence emerges, while maintaining version control over assumptions used in planning.

Candidate qualifications

• Bring a 12–18-year career with meaningful strategic business-finance responsibility in banking or financial services. Show a portfolio decision where your work changed segment focus, investment or growth pace, and identify the executive forum that acted on it. Reporting a RAROC number without explaining its inputs and decision consequence does not establish readiness for this specialist senior leadership role.
• Demonstrate technical understanding of profitability, transfer pricing, operating-cost allocation and capital usage, including how risk-owned inputs affect financial interpretation. You must be able to reconcile analytical returns to reported results and explain differences without conflating accounting profit with risk-adjusted value. Rigorous finance education is required; a specific statutory accounting designation is not mandatory for this strategy-focused seat.
• Have influenced business, risk and finance stakeholders when each preferred a different view of performance. Evidence should include a disputed methodology, the alternatives you tested and how governance resolved the issue. Sound judgement means respecting independent risk authority while challenging whether a commercial proposal has honestly represented its economic dependencies and use of scarce resources.
• Show leadership of analytical professionals and a practical approach to communicating complexity. The selection discussion will examine how you avoided false precision, documented sensitivities and kept assumptions current after a strategy decision. Familiarity with data tools is useful, but the role requires personally explainable reasoning and accountability for the recommendation rather than reliance on an opaque model or impressive dashboard.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 15 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-104.