Yes Bank has laid off four senior officials and revamped teams across retail, corporate and commercial banking businesses as part of its restructuring exercise, according to three persons aware of the matter. Mint has also reviewed a copy of the mail informing the employees of these changes.
Four senior-level officials—including Akshay Sapru, head of affluent and private banking; Dhaval Shah, head of SME banking; Sanjiv Roy, head of fee business; and Pankaj Sharma, chief strategy officer—have been asked to step down with immediate effect as on Thursday.
The strategy transformation team under Sharma has been disbanded, and the digital banking team under him will now report to Prashant Kumar, managing director and chief executive officer, according to one of the people mentioned before. “We were informed of the decision only 2-3 days ago,” said one of the employees asked to go.
The bank’s managing director and chief executive Prashant Kumar, sent a mail to all employees on Thursday, informing them of changes at the senior management level.
“Making our branch the fulcrum of growth, the branch will remain the fulcrum of our bank and one of the most effective touch points in reaching our customers to further optimize synergies for accelerating profitable growth and providing our customers seamless experience. The following business functions will integrate with branch banking structure. Private, fee-based business, liability product management, micro-enterprise banking, spectrum banking, inbound call centre,” said the mail.
All these functions will now come under Dheeraj Sanghi, the country head of branch banking, affluent and institutional banking.
Tighter cost control measures
Changes have also been made to large corporate business, which was earlier managed by two zonal heads and will now converge under a new country head large corporate, said the letter. Commercial banking, which primarily includes SME banking, has also seen changes.
“We are committed to further strengthening the Yes Bank’s position as a customer centric bank. To achieve this, we will harness synergies across all functions and deliver unparalleled solutions and services seamlessly to our customers. Our focus remains on achieving profitable growth with a target of obtaining a Return on investments (ROI) of 1.5% through expansion of margin, disciplined cost management and sustained momentum in cross-sale driven fees,” said the letter.
These changes are “part of the organization streamlining process to achieve operational efficiencies”.
Yes Bank has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Last year, The Economic Times had reported that the bank had undertaken a massive lay off at least 500 employees across several verticals ranging from wholesale to retail, the branch banking segment.
The restructuring, initiated by McKinsey, is part of a cost cutting exercise to improve the bank’s cost to income ratio, according to two of the people cited earlier. The private sector lender’s cost to income ratio stood at 71.1% at the end of December 2024.
Yes Bank’s operational expense rose 13.2% year on year to ₹2,657 crore at the end of December 2023. Staff costs rose 10.2% year on year to ₹1,004.
“As guided earlier, with asset mix largely remaining stable between Wholesale and Retail, coupled with our ongoing transformation exercise including right-sizing initiatives and greater leverage of technology, productivity and process improvements, we expect our cost to income ratio to continue to further improve from here on,” said Kumar in his third quarter analyst call.
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