Shikha Sharma is one of the most influential and inspirational personalities who has motivated a lot of women and men around the country. She is known as someone who, being a female held a financial institution’s CEO position for nine long years. Sharma is the only longest serving woman CEO of a financial institution ever.
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In this blog, we’re going to talk about the ex Axis Bank CEO Shikha Sharma. We’ll get to know what it took for Shikha to become who she is today. So without further ado, let’s get started right away with it.
Contents
Shikha Sharma Early Life & Family Background
Shikha Sharma was born on 19 November 1958. She was the ex Axis Bank CEO and Director from 2009 to 2018. Sharma was hired at the Axis Bank to strengthen its retail lending franchise.
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Shikha belongs to an Army background family. She used to travel a lot because of various transfers by the armed forces. Finally, she ended up in Delhi where she completed her schooling from Loreto Convent. After completing her schooling, she went to Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi to pursue Economics (Hons.) and later on landed herself in IIM Ahmedabad to pursue her MBA. She also boasts of a Post Graduate Diploma in Software technology from the National Centre for Software Technology in Mumbai.
In an interview, Shikha Sharma told that she always wanted to go for Physics as it was her most liked subject. But Lady Shri Ram College didn’t offer Physics as an undergraduate course. So she settled for Economics. However, she doesn’t have any sort of regrets as Economics gave her so much that we had to write an article on her.
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She is married to Sanjaya Sharma who was also the batchmate at her IIM-A class. The couple has two children, Tilak and Tvisha. Shikha Sharma also has two younger brothers are cardiologists by profession.
Shikha Sharma Career
Shikha Sharma started her career with ICICI bank where she worked for 29 long years. She worked tirelessly to setup and build security systems for ICICI bank. In her final years at ICICI bank, she was promoted to as the CEO of ICICI Prudential where she handled a lot of projects like Life Insurances etc.
Shikha Sharma Awards & Recognition
From time to time, Shikha Sharma has received various awards and accolades. For the work and efforts that she has put in, she surely deserved all these awards. Some of the awards like:
- Outstanding Businesswoman of the Year, CNBC TV 18’s Business Leader Awards
- Entrepreneur of the Year – Manager at the E&Y Entrepreneur Awards in 2007
- Businesswoman of the Year at the Economic Times Award
- Business Today ‘Hall of Fame’ – 2011
- Finance Asia’s Top 20 Women in Finance
- AIMA – JRD TATA Corporate Leadership Award for the Year 2014
And there more and more awards that we can add in this list, but we’ll keep it to here only.
Shikha Sharma Rare Facts
During her final press conference at the ICICI Bank, she told that the bank had a lot of liabilities towards people.
Shikha had to exit from Axis Bank as it’s known that she couldn’t handle the way Axis was performing. It was way beyond her expectations.
She was offered to be a part of ech Mahindra as the member of their Board of Directors. Today, they have Haigreve Khaitan and Shikha Sharma are their new independent directors.
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