This happens to be one sector dominated by successful women leaders. The low profile and understated Aditya Puri stands out, as a result. And his bank has delivered. Ranked 6th in the previous year, the bank has moved up to the 3rd position in this year’s financial companies ranking. It was a transformational year for the bank in more ways than one. Riding on a slew of digital innovations, many of them pioneering and several initiatives in rural India, HDFC Bank was able to cement its position as a premier bank across markets.
While HDFC Bank’s operations complemented by new initiatives during the year led to higher revenues and profitability, its traditional prudence ensured that it did not come at the cost of asset quality.
Interestingly, HDFC Bank’s net profit and PAT are second to none in this year’s ranking. It stood at Rs 19,511 crore and Rs 12,833 crore, respectively, much ahead of State Bank of India, which is ranked one and ICICI Bank which is ranked at number two positions.
The bank expects higher outlay on various social sector programmes and implementation of Seventh Central Pay Commission recommendations to boost consumption spending. The business strategy and approach to business, HDFC Bank’s mission is to be a ‘World Class Indian Bank’ benchmarking itself against international standards and best practices in terms of product offerings, technology, customer service levels, risk management, audit and compliance.
Says Aditya Puri, MD, HDFC Bank, “Our objective is to continue building sound customer franchises across distinct businesses so as to be a preferred provider of banking services for its target retail and wholesale customer segments and to achieve a healthy growth in profitability, consistent with the bank’s risk appetite. Our business philosophy is based on five core values: customer focus, operational excellence, product leadership, people and sustainability.” Based on these cornerstones, HDFC Bank aims to meet the financial needs of customers while ensuring service of the highest quality, he adds.
IT is a key enabler and facilitator to the critical goals of HDFC Bank allowing it to make systems and processes even more efficient. Since its inception, the bank continued to invest heavily in technology to provide better products and superior customer experience. The bank continues to spread its electronically linked branch network with state-of-the-art IT enabled core banking platform to ensure customers have access to 24x7 banking services.
HDFC Bank now has a large branch network in rural India. There are infrastructure limitations in deep geography. It has taken steps to address these issues, so that it can offer various products and seamless services to clients across the length and breadth of the country. HDFC Bank also implemented Desktop Virtualisation, a cloud technology solution, to ensure that it is able to overcome limitations of telecom networks. Bandwidth acceleration and compression technology has been implemented to empower rural/semi urban branches to improve the speed of the telecommunication network.
Innovation in the bank has been driven by digitisation, the building block for which was laid two decades ago by investing in technology. Digitisation has been a theme for the bank in the last two years and it gained substantial momentum in the year under review.
BW Reporters
The author is associate editor at BW Businessworld
