Vikram Pandit is the current CEO of Citigroup.
Pandit 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.

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 also well as remaining CEO of Citigroup Europe. Pandit was strongly supported by interim chairman Robert Rubin[2]. Pandit is the effective successor to Chuck Prince who resigned in November 2007 due to unexpectedly poor 3rd quarter performance, mainly due to CDO and MBS related losses.

Pandit earned $165.2 million in connection with the sale of Old Lane Partners, the investment firm Citigroup bought in April 2007 for $800 million to lure him to the company. 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 over $48 million, though the options currently have no cash value. His total earnings from Citigroup add up to $216 million.

The 51-year-old Pandit was born on January 14, 1957 in Nagpur, Maharashtra, India, to a moderately affluent Maharashtrian family. 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.[5] He is a trustee at Columbia University.
He 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. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Indian government in 2008.

A deeply religious person, Pandit visits the shrine of Gajanan Maharaj every time he visits India to see his family members there. “There is a room bearing his name in the shrine’s ‘Bhakta Nivas’ (a lodge for devotees),” Pandit’s uncle Suresh said.

Pandit and his wife Swati live with their two children (Maya and Rahul) in an $18m co-op apartment at Central Park West and 81st Street. He insists that he doesn’t engage in the excesses sometimes associated with CEOs of large firms, never having been golfing, not engaging in conspicuous consumption on items like art or wine, and preferring reading a book than sitting on a yacht.