FASTER, HIGHER, STRONGER

HDFC Bank, the largest private bank in India, pads up for its first major leadership transition as growth momentum speeds up

- NEVIN JOHN

As the search for a new managing director intensifies at India’s largest private bank, Aditya Puri, MD, and CEO, HDFC Bank, has been shuttling from one destination to the other meeting customers, bank employees and government officials. A few weeks back, Puri was in Madikeri, a hill town in Karnataka. Over the past few months, the 69-year-old banker travelled to Uttaranchal, Himachal Pradesh, and Sikkim to study customer needs and understand what the employees can do to build the bank further. While he will retire in October 2020, he doesn’t want to sit and think back about how he built the bank over the last 25 years, and which now has assets of ₹12 lakh crore, but work towards its future.

HDFC Bank, which started operations in 1994 with Puri as its first employee, has seen profits grow 10 times in the last decade. The bank posted a consolidated profit of ₹22,446 crore, up 20.93 per cent, on income of ₹1,24,108 crore in FY19. The bank’s value in the stock market has increased 600 per cent in the last 10 years to ₹6.5 lakh crore until February, when it became the most valued firm in the country after Reliance Industries and TCS. In the BT-KPMG Best Banks study, the bank has once again emerged as the winner in the large bank category based on quantitative study. It also bagged the Bank of the Year award along with State Bank of India.

Puri has been leading the bank as its coachman during these years, though he prefers to call himself “first among equals”. The bank has nurtured talent. Many who now head other companies have worked there at various points. Rajesh Kumar, who used to be head of retail credit and risk unit at HDFC Bank, has joined as MD and CEO of TransUnion CIBIL, and Nitin Chugh has become MD of Ujjivan Small Finance Bank. “We have depth three ways down because we have collaborative management. I am not a top-down boss,” says Puri.