Ajay Banga
The Catalyst
Ideas with a spark, energy, range and the ability to start things.
Ajay Banga arrived at the World Bank in 2023 with explicit instructions to reinvent it, and he did, which is why he reads so cleanly as The Catalyst. He widened the institution's mandate beyond poverty reduction to include climate and global resilience, mobilised private capital at unprecedented scale, and generated urgency around reforms that had stalled for decades. His years building Mastercard's emerging-markets networks supplied the persuasive, future-facing energy the archetype demands.
“I want to be called the ultimate plumber. I fix the plumbing of the World Bank, because you can keep building a new house on top of plumbing that's not working, and that's a recipe for disaster.”
“Jobs is what I want to be seen as the transition of the bank. I want to move this bank from working on input to working on the output of jobs, because that's the ultimate way to put a nail in the coffin of poverty.”
“I believe very deeply that we must be great partners on the ground. The challenges in the world are too big for people to create silos and try and solve them by themselves. Two plus two is equal to five.”
The David Rubenstein Show: “Ajay Banga”
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