BIOGRAPHY
Suvo Sarkar is a banker with over 36 years’ experience in retail banking, business banking and wealth
management across Asia and the Middle East.
He is the founder and CEO of 3D Advisory, a boutique
consulting firm that focuses on the three pillars of Digitisation, Data and Design in financial services. He is a
senior advisor to McKinsey & Co and Mastercard and serves on the regional advisory board of IBM and on
the advisory board of a number of fintech start-ups in India and Middle East. Till 2023, he was the Senior
Executive Vice President and Group Head of Retail Banking and Wealth Management at Emirates NBD, the
largest retail bank in the UAE and the most profitable bank in the Middle East.
Suvo has previously worked with three multi-national banks – Standard Chartered, ANZ Grindlays and
Citibank NA, and two regional banks – National Bank of Dubai and National Bank of Abu Dhabi. He has
launched and run successful businesses in UAE, Bahrain, KSA, Egypt, UK, Singapore, India and Indonesia.
Suvo’s last role at Emirates NBD was to oversee two major businesses of the bank globally, Retail Banking
and Wealth Management, which together contribute to c. USD 3 billion in annual revenues, about 50% of the
group, have a customer base of over 2 million across 5 countries and a balance sheet of over USD 60 billion.
He co-led the massive digital transformation of the bank between 2017 and 2022 and was the creator of Liv,
the first digital bank in the Middle East, launched in 2017, with over 500,000 customers today. Suvo
relaunched the bank’s Business Banking, Priority Banking and Private Banking businesses with new products,
segments and digital processes. He was responsible for revamping the service proposition of the bank,
optimising end-to-end processes, automating credit approvals and improving customer satisfaction scores.
Suvo also oversaw the group-wide marketing function at Emirates NBD and helped create the most valuable
financial services brand in UAE, valued at c. USD 4 billion.
Suvo is an engineer by degree and is a Andrew Yule gold medallist from the Indian Institute of Technology
(ISM), Dhanbad. He is an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta where he won the Glaxo
Medal in Marketing. He has had leadership training at Stanford University Graduate School of Business,
INSEAD and Said Business School at Oxford. He is also a qualified investment advisor.
Suvo has served as a Non-Executive Director at Emirates NBD Egypt, Network International
(the largest payments processing company in Middle East) and Tanfeeth (Emirates NBD’s operations
subsidiary). He has also served as Chairman of the board of Emirates NBD Asset Management (the largest
asset manager by AUM in the UAE), of Emirates Money (erstwhile consumer finance company owned by
Emirates NBD group) and of Emirates NBD Securities (one of the top 3 brokerage companies in the UAE). He
currently serves pro-bono on the advisory board of GEMS Modern Academy, one of the highest rated schools
in the UAE.
In 2015, Suvo was recognized by the Asian Banker as the Retail Banker of the Year. In 2017, he was named
the Digital Leader of the Middle East by the MIT Sloan Review and in 2018 as the Digital Leader of the Year
by Seamless. Retail Banker International has honoured him in 2018 with the international Retail Banker of the
Year award, in 2019 with the Trailblazer Award for Asia and in 2020 with a global Lifetime Achievement Award.
Suvo is well regarded as a thought leader in the banking industry in the Middle East, is a charter member of
TiE Dubai and writes a popular monthly column in Gulf News on financial services. He has recently started a
fortnightly podcast called “Money Majlis” where he explores consequential topics with senior leaders of
financial services from the Middle East. He lives in Dubai with his wife and loves reading, traveling and music.