Institution Builder

AFTER USING TECHNOLOGY TO TRANSFORM INDIAN BANKING AND STEERING INFOSYS PAST ITS BIGGEST CRISIS, K.V. KAMATH, FORMER CHAIRMAN, ICICI BANK, HELPED MULTILATERAL LENDER NEW DEVELOPMENT BANK SCALE UP MASSIVELY DURING HIS FIVE-YEAR STINT

- ANAND ADHIKARI

Of the eight years that Kundapur Vaman Kamath spent at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in the late 1980s, he was in Indonesia for four years. A fast learner, Kamath, an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus became fairly fluent in national language Bahasa Indonesia. Three decades later when he took up the chairmanship of New Development Bank (NDB) in Shanghai, the foreign language anxiety did resurface again as it meant communicating in ‘Mandarin’ in day-to-day conversations to survive five years in the city.

But advanced technologies in language translation relieved the language fears. “The App did a good job in seconds to convey the message,” grins Kamath who also speaks Kannada and Tulu fluently. The former chairman of Infosys, who spent 13 years at ICICI Group, is a technology enthusiast. At ICICI Group, which witnessed a reverse merger of much larger developmental financial institution ICICI Ltd with the bank in 2002, he was instrumental in installing ATMs by the thousands, launching electronic trading platform, and introducing ATM on wheels among others.

Kamath's tryst with technology continued even at NDB. “We had first-hand experience and opportunity to use light and nimble stuff at NDB at a fraction of the cost of other banks and institutions,” says Kamath. His elevation as NDB Chairman, set up by the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), for financing infrastructure and sustainable development projects, was a career high.