THE DOUBLE ENGINE BANK

The bank’s wholesale banking engine is firing on all cylinders when the retail growth is a bit muted in the industry

- ANAND ADHIKARI

FUTURE FOCUS Sashidhar Jagdishan, MD & CEO, HDFC Bank

TRY IT OUT, make a mistake, learn, and try it again! That’s the new catchphrase at HDFC Bank. The person backing the initiative is 56-year-old Sashidhar Jagdishan, the MD & CEO. Today, there are fundamental and structural shifts taking place in the banking space. The Mumbai-headquartered bank has set up an ‘Innovation Lab’, where over the next 12 months it plans to run some 100 experiments to try out new products, new geographies and new customer segments. “The hallmark of our strategy is that it has the ability to adapt and evolve without losing the core,” Jagdishan said in a recent message to shareholders.

HDFC Bank has set the agenda in the banking space over its nearly 30-year journey. For most of the past decade and a half, it has been among the top few in terms of quantitative rankings in the BT-KPMG Best Banks Surveys. In 2020-21, it emerges as the Best Large Bank (see box).