- Current role
- Chief Financial Officer
- Company
- Meridian Bank
- Experience
- 21 years
- Industry
- BFSI
- Based
- Mumbai
About
Ananya Iyer is chief financial officer of Meridian Bank, a mid-sized private lender with a balance sheet weighted towards small-business credit. She was appointed in July 2026 after four years as deputy CFO and head of treasury, and is the first woman to hold the role at the bank.
Iyer spent the first decade of her career on the sell side, covering financials at two domestic brokerages, which she credits for a habit of reading her own bank’s disclosures the way a sceptical analyst would. She moved into a corporate role in 2015 and has since worked almost entirely on funding structure — extending the bank’s liability profile and reducing its dependence on bulk deposits.
She has been unusually public about the bank’s provisioning assumptions, publishing a quarterly note on the coverage ratio methodology, and has argued that the sector’s disclosure standards are set too close to the regulatory floor.
Leadership perspective
- What does the market misread about mid-sized Indian banks?
- Deposit franchise quality. Everyone models loan growth because it is on the front page of the deck. The liability side decides whether that growth is worth anything.
- Why publish your provisioning methodology?
- Because the alternative is that analysts guess, and their guess becomes the number the market trades on. I would rather be argued with than modelled incorrectly.