Country & Regional Focus
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Indian Challenges and Opportunities

by Neil Ainger, freelance journalist & treasury writer

The Indian economy is expected to grow 7.4% in 2015, according to the World Bank, aided by a liberalising new government that wants to integrate it further into the global economy. Its population will outpace China by 2040 and it’s a young country with half its people still under 24, many with exceptional skills and languages. The fundamentals for long-term growth are there, as an audience at BNP Paribas’ 8th Cash Management University (CMU) heard on 28 May in Paris.

Challenges remain, however, with infrastructure that needs overhauling, lopsided development and 10 million new jobs a year needed – not to mention the difficulty of doing collections across such a vast country.

Bipin Tibrewal, chief financial officer (CFO) of Airbus Group India and Krishnan Sharma, the treasurer at advertising firm Publicis Groupe, discussed their respective treasury experiences in the country. They also provided the BNP Paribas CMU workshop audience on 28 May with case studies on their different shared service centre (SSC) integration projects and cash management capabilities (see case study boxes).