LIC IPO: Who Is New CFO Sunil Agarwal?

LIC IPO: LIC had been looking for a CFO to succeed Shubhangi Sanjay Soman since September 2021. Sunil Agarwal has served in top management positions in two of the biggest insurers in India, ICICI Prudential and Reliance Nippon.

New Delhi: Ahead of the mega IPO, the biggest life insurer in India, Life Insurance Corporation (LIC), hired insurance veteran Sunil Agarwal as the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). According to Bloomberg, this is the first time that LIC has hired an outsider for the top management post.

The main role of Agarwal would be to align the insurer with the market standards before the launch of the LIC IPO. It has become increasingly necessary because of the ongoing Russia Ukraine war. Global stock markets have been weak and unstable. The government of India last week said that they might review the application date of the IPO if the situation remains disturbed.

The LIC had advertised a vacancy for the role of CFO in September 2021, the report added. However, the appointment has not been made public by the company yet. Earlier, the post of CFO was called LIC’s Executive Director of Finance and Accounting. Agarwal will succeed Shubhangi Sanjay Soman as CFO. He will fetch a salary of Rs 75 lakh per annum, according to the advertisement.

Who Is Sunil Agarwal?

A Chartered Accountant (CA) by education, Agarwal has been a big name in the insurance sector in India. According to Agarwal’s LinkedIn profile, he completed his Engineering in Computer Science from Amravati University in 1995. After that, he pursued the career of Chartered Accountant from ICAI.

From ICAI, he has done a number of courses apart from Chartered Accountant. He has completed the courses of Public Finance And Government Accounting, Concurrent Audit of Books, Forensic Accounting & Fraud Detection, among others. The latest addition to the list is the course on The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code in 2022.

He served in two of the biggest insurance firms in India namely ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company and Reliance Nippon Life Insurance. In ICICI, he worked for over 5 years and served as the Senior Finance Manager in Mumbai for over a year.

At Reliance Nippon, he served for 12 years, 9 out of which he was the CFO of the company. He also has his own CA company by the name of SARA & Co. in Mumbai.

His LinkedIn description reads, “Ability to think-ahead and look beyond the obvious.”