Bhaskar Rao

CFO at Bangalore International Airport

Speaker

Bhaskar is currently the Chief financial officer for Bangalore International Airport (BIAL). BIAL is the first airport in India under the Public Private Participation route handling about 30 million passengers per year. In his 5.5-year tenure at BIAL, he has worked on the development program and arranged the financial closure for the $2 bn capital expansion program aimed at doubling BIAL’s capacity and developing a word class Airport City. He has been championing the Digital Transformation journey at BIAL overseeing key strategic decisions including contactless travel, paperless workflow systems and IOT based Asset Management tools. He also had the arduous task to ensure sustainability of operations during the Covid pandemic environment while supporting other business partners and keeping employee costs intact.

Prior to BIAL, he has worked as Chief Strategy Officer for a large international conglomerate group in the UAE between 2014 and 2017 handling the diversification and expansion strategy for the group.

Between 2009 and 2014, Bhaskar was the Energy Sector CFO and the CFO for the Corporate Division of the GMR Group.

He was honoured as CFO of the year 2021 – Infrastructure by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

He has also founded a retail start-up company in the small format supermarket space in Bangalore, India, growing it to a 50-store chain with successful disinvestment.