This is post the movement of Rajnish Agarwal to Mahindra Rural Housing Finance (MRHFL), the company said.

Raul is a career banker with nearly two decades of extensive work in the domain of rural banking and financial inclusion. Prior to joining Mahindra Finance, he was associated with Axis Bank as EVP & head- rural lending & financial inclusion.

In his nearly two decades with Axis Bank, Raul led key businesses including farmer funding, gold loans, MSME lending, commodity loans, tractor & farm equipment lending, agri-value chain finance, microfinance (retail & wholesale) and the financial inclusion department. He also led the business correspondent channel including 15000+ partner outlets and the Micro ATM channel of the bank. He played a pivotal role to increase the banks distribution in rural and semi-urban areas through light format banking outlets, micro-ATMs and rural ecosystem partnerships.

Raul is credited with several transformational interventions viz. introducing various end-to-end digital initiatives and paperless loan journeys for low-income households besides launching suitable phygital (physical plus digital) tools and customer journeys. A post graduate in management from Goa Institute of Management, Raul is an active member on various industry and trade association bodies.

Ramesh Iyer, vice-chairman & managing director, Mahindra Finance, said, “It is our pleasure to welcome Raul to the leadership team of Mahindra Finance. As we work very deep into the rural market, the next 3-4 years could really be critical with a good rural bounce back, capitalizing on all emerging opportunities in the rural market. We are broad basing our management team to be able to handle all our new initiatives, to really go deeper and make the rural market bigger for us.”

Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services (M&M Financial Services), part of the Mahindra Group, is a non-banking finance companies.

The NBFC reported a consolidated net loss of Rs 1,573 crore in Q1 FY22 as against a net profit of Rs 432 crore in Q1 FY21. Total income during the quarter declined by 15.1% YoY to Rs 1,416 crore.

The scrip advanced 2.40% to currently trade at Rs 164 on the BSE.