Early life
Pandit was born on January 14, 1957 in Nagpur, Maharashtra, India, to a moderately affluent Maharashtrian family. His father S B Pandit was an executive director of Sarabhai Chemicals in Baroda.
Pandit completed his schooling at the Dadar Parsee Youths Assembly High School in Dadar, Mumbai. He moved to the United States when he was sixteen to study at Columbia University. He received B.S. , M.S. in electrical engineering and M.B.A in 1976, 1977 and 1980 respectively and Ph.D. in finance from Columbia Business School in 1986. He is a trustee at Columbia University.
Career
Pandit was a professor at Indiana University Bloomington before joining Morgan Stanley. As head of Morgan Stanley's institutional securities division from 1994 to 2000, he pushed the company further into electronic trading and helped to build prime brokerage services that catered to hedge funds. He led the institutional securities from 2000 to 2005. The Indian government awarded him the Padma Bhushan in 2008.
He was the President and Chief Operating Officer of the Institutional Securities and Investment Banking Group at Morgan Stanley, where he was responsible for the overall management of the group and focused on the trading, sales, and infrastructure aspects of the business (2000–2005). Prior to that position, Pandit served as the managing director and head of the Worldwide Institutional Equities Division (1994–2000), and as the managing director and head of the US Equity Syndicate (1990–1994) for Morgan Stanley. Pandit left Morgan Stanley with a few colleagues to start a hedge fund named Old Lane Partners. Citigroup subsequently purchased the fund in 2007 for $800 million. Pandit received approximately $165.2 million for this transaction. Many analysts believe that this hefty price was paid for a hedge fund with only $4.5 billion under management to get Pandit onto Citigroup. He received an additional $2.7 million in the roughly six months he served as head of Citigroup's investment bank and alternative investments group. In January 2008, Pandit was given a sign-on grant of stock and performance-based options worth more than $48 million, though the options currently have no cash value. His total earnings from Citigroup add up to $216 million.
Pandit serves on the boards of Columbia University, Columbia Business School, the Indian School of Business and The Trinity School. He is a former board member of NASDAQ (2000–2003), the New York City Investment Fund.
On December 11, 2007, Pandit was named the new CEO of Citigroup, replacing interim-CEO Sir Winfried Bischoff, who became chairman of the board as well as remaining CEO of Citigroup Europe. Interim chairman Robert Rubin strongly supported Pandit[6], who is the effective successor to Chuck Prince. Prince resigned in November 2007 due to unexpectedly poor 3rd-quarter performance, mainly due to CDO- and MBS-related losses.
Personal life
Pandit and his wife, Swati, live with their daughter, Maya and son, Rahul in an $18m co-op apartment on the Upper West Side. Paradoxically, he doesn't engage in the excesses associated with CEOs of large firms; he has rarely been golfing, does not engage in conspicuous consumption on items like art or wine, and prefers reading a book to sitting on a yacht.
A Hindu, Pandit visits the shrine of Gajanan Maharaj each time he visits his family members in India.
