A Bank For The Buck (The New Bank Movement & The Untold Story of The Making of India's Most Valued Bank)

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Item Code: NAH540
Author: Tamal Bandyopadhyay
Publisher: Jaico Publishing House
Language: English
Edition: 2013
ISBN: 9788184953961
Pages: 376 (17 B/W Illustrations)
Cover: Paperback
Other Details 8.7 inch x 5.5 inch
Weight 370 gm
Fully insured
Fully insured
Shipped to 153 countries
Shipped to 153 countries
More than 1M+ customers worldwide
More than 1M+ customers worldwide
100% Made in India
100% Made in India
23 years in business
23 years in business
Book Description
About The Book

This is the story of the birth and growth of India's most valued Bank HDFC Bank Ltd against the backdrop of the new hank movement in India that started in 1994 when the Reserve Bank of India opened up the sector to introduce competition and to force hanks to be efficient and more productive.

Many hooks have tried to give meaning to India's recent history, to put it in the larger context of a complicated and confounding society, hut this effort stands out because it does something that has been difficult to attempt retelling the story of modern India through the lens of business.

Given the author's familiarity with hankers, policy makers and central bankers, this fast- paced, jargon - free hook, written for a wide audience, brings to life an engrossing and sweeping tale of 21st century India, with all its foibles and charms.

 

About The Author

Tamal Bandyopadhyay is one of the most respected business journalists in India. His weekly column, Banker’s Trust, in India’s second-largest read financial daily Mint, where he is Deputy Managing Editor, is widely read for its deep insights into the world of finance and its unerring ability to anticipate major policy moves.

Tamal has kept a close watch on the financial sector for over fifteen years and has had a ringside view of the enormous change in Indian finance over this period. He has been a frequent speaker at seminars across India and has hosted a very successful weekly show (by the same name as his weekly column) on television, featuring some of India’s most respected bankers, policy maker, central bankers and regulator.

He has contributed to the Oxford Companion to Economics in India, edited by Kaushik Basu and published by Oxford University Press in 2007. Banker’s Trust, an anthology of His weekly Column in Mint, has recently been published. This is Tamal’s first book.

 

Preface

What one can do when one turns eighteen varies from country to country. In India, one can vote and get a licence to drive a car, but one can't drink in public places. In New Delhi, India's capital, and Mumbai, the commercial hub, the drinking age is twenty-five years. In China, the world's fastest growing economy, turning eighteen gives one the licence to drink.

If one goes by the date of incorporation, HDFC Bank turned eighteen on 30 August 2012. Has life since become very different for the bank's employees, customers and investors? I don't think so. It has been life as usual for the bank. The freedom of 'adulthood' hasn't changed its character-it won't probably do anything it hasn't done so far.

In some sense, this bank has been a precocious child; it has known pretty well from day one that as a bank what it doesn't do matters more than what it does.

It hasn't done many things that its peers have done or tried to do and so the past eighteen years have not been hugely exciting. There has been absolutely no volatility in its performance-it has announced its earnings with monotonous precision, quarter after quarter, higher than the industry average-something the investors love and swear by.

HDFC Bank does very ordinary things in ordinary ways, but that yields extraordinary results. With this book I have attempted to tell the story of HDFC Bank in the context of the overall banking space in India, which has been changing with freedom from regulations, introduction of new products and newer ideas. Since my focus is the story, I haven't used excessive data unless they help illustrate the story. Many of the anecdotes in this book aren't in public domain yet, and in that sense this book is the untold story of the making of India’s most valuable bank.

I started reporting on the banking sector about a year after HDFC Bank was born, but I discovered several incidents narrated in this book only while working on this project. They have been impeccably sourced, even though in some case the people involved don't want to be named.

This book is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with bankers, central bankers, policy makers, corporate executives, consumers and investors in different parts of India and overseas. Most of the interviews were conducted in person and a few on the phone. For the data, I depended on information available in the public domain such as stock market notice documents filed with regulators in India and abroad and the bank's balance sheets.

Some of the conversations narrated in this book may not be exactly the way they happened because they were not documented; I depended on people's versions, recalled from their memories. I have lightly edited these in a few case for effect, but by and large they are a faithful representation of what happened.

I have tried to maintain an informal style of narration. For instance, I have used the first names of people mentioned in the book unless more than one person has the same first name, as that would have created confusion. So, Deepak Parekh is called Deepak, but Deepak Maheshwari and Deepak Satwalekar have been referred to by their surnames. D. D. Rathi of the Aditya Birla Group is well known by his surname and hence I call him Rathi, but Ishaat Hussain of Tata Sons Ltd is Ishaat, and not Hussain. The entire story is divided into thirteen chapters. They don't follow a chronology but rather a theme, as my objective is not to merely write the bank's history but to weave the story of the making of a successful bank in India after economic liberalization.

The first four chapters- 'One Day in Malaysia', 'Raising a Toast: 'The Dirty Dozen' and 'There's a Baby on the Trading Floor!' - are about the making of the bank: how it was conceptualized, how the team was built and the fun of the initial days when many senior recruits wore helmets and supervised the brick and mortar work at the headquarters and the branches and held training sessions under a tree at a textile mill compound in central Mumbai.

The next four chapters- 'Business Before the Shop Opens', 'Doing Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways', 'The Change in Course' and 'The Entire Pyramid' -discuss the business philosophy of the bank and how it is different from that of others. Chapter 6 is, in fact, the heart of the book. It talks about the things that make HDFC Bank different from others, in terms of business philosophy, product innovation, cost of funds, risk management and so on. Chapters 9 and 10 are about two mergers, the first instance of a friendly merger through share swap and the biggest merger in India's banking history, respectively. Again, the emphasis is not on financial ratios and data but on how the mergers happened-the inside story. Of course, there are data but their use is limited to creating the context.

HDFC Bank, despite being a highly successful venture, couldn't escape the regulator's wrath. On two occasions, the bank was penalized by the RBI. Chapter 11—‘Warts and All' -dissects what went wrong with the bank, how it got into a mess and the safety valves it created to avoid such incidents. The next chapter-'The Common Sense Banker'- tries to analyse the Puri magic, what makes Aditya Puri, the longest-serving chief executive officer of any bank in India, different from his peers.

Finally, the last chapter-'Whose Bank Is It Anyway?'—looks at why this bank has been successful. It's not that it hasn't had problems-in terms of the occasional boardroom fights with the promoter on policies and minor egotistical skirmishes among senior people-but despite these it has succeeded because it's nobody's bank.

The key lesson from the HDFC Bank story is that freedom for professional managers, non-interference by the board and the promoter and passion for success are more important than ownership. HDFC Bank illustrates this formula better than anybody else-something that the new set of private banks opening shop soon can imbibe. If you like the book, my dear reader, it's because the story of the bank is compelling. If you find it boring, blame the storyteller.

 

Contents

 

     
  Foreword xvii
  Preface xxiii
  Acknowledgements xxix
Chapter 1 One Day in Malaysia 1
  The next day, shortly after Deepak checked in at a hotel in Mauritius, the telephone rang. It was Aditya. 'I am on: he said.  
Chapter 2 Raising a Toast 21
  Hasmukh-bhai, by then chairman emeritus at HDFC, was blunt. 'We don't know anything about banking. Why do we need a bank?' he asked.  
Chapter 3 The Dirty Dozen 41
  salary hike, no foreign trips, back to your own home, how does that sound to you?' Aditya asked (Samir).  
Chapter 4 'There's a Baby on the Trading Floor!' 75
  Hardly a week had passed since (Manmohan) Singh launched the bank when the bank's ATM swallowed the ATM card of (Deepak) Satwalekar, managing director of HDFC.  
Chapter 5 Business Before the Shop Opens 101
  Aditya didn't allow Merrill Lynch and Co. and Morgan Stanley, the book runners for ADS, to decide who will get the shares and who won't.  
Chapter 6 Doing Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways 121
  Bankers flew in at midnight for stress testing of brokers.  
Chapter 7 The Change in Course 151
  'We are a respected bank, not an FMCG company. Tomorrow, will we sell underwear from our branches?'  
Chapter 8 The Entire Pyramid.. 175
  'At Pimpalgaon, once a villager asked [Aditya] how much loan the bank can give against gold. He wanted Rs.5 crore.'  
Chapter 9 Merger, Merger on the Wall 203
  Deepak recollects: '[At AIIMS, Ashok Jain] said that he had told all three [his two sons and his son-in-law] to get out of the bank and sell it to me, but only for shares.'  
Chapter 10 Anatomy of a Big Bang Merger 223
  One fine morning. out of the blue. Rana (Talwar) called Deepak and offered to merge.  
Chapter 11 Warts and All 241
  Had the senior person noticed the red flag mat the system raised. It would have been a different story.  
Chapter 12 The Common Sense Banker 263
  'He gives the impression of being an extremely aggressive guy. but if you look closely his banking is as conservative as it can be.'  
Chapter 13 Whose Bank Is It Anyway? 295
  Once the market is opened to competition. people must be allowed the freedom. They are capable of delivering me best globally.  
  Abbreviations 323
  List of Persons 325
  List of Institutions / Groups / Locations 328
  Glossary 333
  Glossary of Hindi Usage 343

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