Reliance Industries Ltd is set to appoint Hitesh Sethia, a top executive of McLaren Strategic Ventures, as the chief executive officer of Jio Financial Services (JFS), news agency Bloomberg reported on March 6, citing sources.
Sethia's appointment, as claimed in the report, will come at a time when JFS is preparing to get listed in the stock market. In October last year, Reliance had announced the demerger of JFS, its financial services business, and had confirmed that it would be separately listed at the bourses.
Moneycontrol could not independently verify the news of Sethia being tapped in by Reliance. A statement was yet to be issued by the company, at the time of writing this report.
Sethia, who has an experience of over 20 years in the field of financial services, is currently heading the Europe business of McLaren. He had joined the group in June last year.
As part of his current role, Sethia is based in Germany's Frankfurt, his LinkeIn profile showed. The sources who spoke to Bloomberg said he would relocate to India after assuming the charge of CEO at JFS.
The news also comes around three months after Reliance announced the appointment of veteran banker KV Kamath as the non-executive vice chairman of JFS. The company, however, is yet to share the initial public offering (IPO) timeline.
In a speech in October, Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani had described JFS as a "transformational, customer centric and digital-first financial services enterprise" that will offer simple, affordable, innovative and intuitive financial services products to all Indians.
"JFS is uniquely positioned to capture multiple growth opportunities in financial services bringing millions of Indians into formal financial institutions,” Ambani had said.
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