Samtani moves on, Goldman Sachs appoints two India co-heads

Bengaluru: In a planned leadership transition, Gunjan Samtani, co-chairman of Goldman Sachs in India and country head of Goldman Sachs Services India, will leave the firm at the end of this year, concluding a 16-year stint with the investment bank. He will continue to serve as co-chairman through the transition period.

As part of the succession plan, Ken Castelino and Balaji Sivasubramanian have been appointed co-heads of Goldman Sachs Services India, while retaining their existing responsibilities.

“Our teams in Bengaluru and Hyderabad are critical to our global operations. As co-heads, Ken and Balaji will oversee all our activities across the firm’s India centres, partnering with both global and local leaders—including the Bengaluru and Hyderabad Executive Councils—to advance our priorities. They will continue to work closely with Gunjan over the coming months to ensure a smooth transition,” the firm said in an internal memo.

Castelino is head of global banking & markets-public in India and co-head of global equities electronic trading strats and engineering. Sivasubramanian is head of engineering in India and global head of enterprise partnerships engineering within platform solutions.

Samtani has been one of the key architects of Goldman Sachs’ India GCC strategy, helping build a deep engineering talent base and expanding the scope of work executed from the country. During his tenure, the firm inaugurated its new Bengaluru campus in 2019, built with an investment of $250 million.

Today, more than 120 global functions, spanning across business and engineering, are carried out from Goldman Sachs’ India centres. The firm employs over 8,000 people across Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

Over the past two decades, Goldman Sachs’ India operations have evolved from providing end-of-day support for trading platforms and exchange connectivity to undertaking sophisticated work in algorithmic trading platforms, data analytics, risk management and client reporting. The India engineering teams have played a significant role in developing Atlas, the firm’s low-latency trading platform that enables clients to perform historical analysis, build quantitative models using real-time market data and execute trades at high speed.