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| Chanda Kochhar goes to war |
| Announcement / Banking Aug 03, 2009, 20:16 IST |
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In an hard talk with Forbes India, the CEO& MD, gives a brand new agenda for shaping ICICI Bank in the wake of a global economic crisis
“Growth can mean various things. It isn’t just about growing the balance sheet” – In a hard talk with Forbes India, Chanda Kochhar CEO & MD of ICICI Bank says this…in a firm voice. For seasoned ICICI watchers, this is the kind of language that qualifies for blasphemy – something that an outsider having no clue of the bank’s institutional history would say. But then Chanda is The Insider. She’s seen how her predecessor K. V. Kamath transformed ICICI from a crumbling DFI to India’s most noticed universal bank with numbers growing by the tenth of a second. But, this business diva has a new formula to banking; she intends to embark on from the very basics of banking.
In an insightful interview with Forbes India, Kochhar talks about viewing the current slowdown as an opportunity to put ICICI bank on a fitness regime and how huge certain structural changes will be implemented.
Over the next one year, she intends to grow the balance sheet by just five percent – an unthinkably low number during Kamath years. But now she is battening down the hatches on two of Kamath’s biggest bets – plant the ICICI flag outside India and aggressively woo rural India.
When queried on the challenges to reshape and grow, Chanda Kochhar stated to Forbes India that, “First we will look at every line item of the P&L and see to improve net inertest margin. And to do that we need to have a whole new CASA strategy. Then on the fee income, while I recognize that the bulky fee income this year will be less, we will develop a more sustainable model of the trade finance transaction. Then, the third is operating expenses. Fourth is to reduce the loss charges. So if I would do these four things during this year, I would think one would have created a better base on which to grow next year.”
Forbes India further reports that soon after Lehman brothers collapsed the bank faced an unprecedented crisis and to manage this crisis a war room was setup. The mantle fell on Kochhar to lead the exercise. She says that, “It taught me couple of things. One, if there is a challenge your shoulder ought to become broader and your back straighter. Confidence is important. Two, you have to be the sponge that absorbs stress. Else, it passes down to the team and they cannot function efficiently.”
With a brand new agenda, the new CEO of ICICI bank shows she is no clone of her mentor. For at least three quarters, Kochhar needs to prove to the rest of the world that the bank can puts its house in order, before it can go out there and do what it does best: Fight!
…All this and much more in the latest Forbes India.
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