How top bankers left cushy jobs to become entrepreneurs

The crowd which dares to walk alone is getting bigger as the years pass, reports Raghu Mohan

In July 2010, Vishwavir Ahuja, who had spent his entire professional life at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch — a decade of it in the biggest sea-facing room on the 16th floor of Express Towers in Mumbai — went over to helm the 64-year old Kolhapur-based Ratnakar Bank (RBL). “Out went the memberships of Taj Chambers, Oberoi Belvedere and the gymkhanas,” says Ahuja, who had, until then, inhaled only the rarefied air in the higher echelons of India Inc. The family moved into a three-bedroom pad on Peddar Road — a comedown of sorts from the five-bedroom ‘Sea View’ apartment on Malabar Hill. He’s since minted enough to buy a few villas, though he is most likely to disagree with you.

When the Hindujas (promoters of IndusInd Bank), buzzed Romesh Sobti to take charge of the bank in late 2008, it hardly had any investor coverage worth the name, yet he walked in with five of his closest aides from ABN Amro Bank. A decade on, as he basks in the marquee name it’s become today, he’s quick to credit the Hindujas: “For the faith they imposed. They had every reason to be sceptical after what they had been through.” It’s a reference to its first decade — in October 2009, a Mint Road draft note on new bank licences had alluded to IndusInd: “...one bank (that) has just about survived.”

The leitmotif running through is the desire for these bankers to go beyond being just another face in a crowd, albeit a very successful one at that. By the time you hit your mid-forties in foreign banks, you pretty much have a good idea where you stand on the podium; or if you have a chance of being on it. Having been on it, what do you do then? Is it going to more of the same (and just how much of it)? 

And then, by the mid-2000s, it had become clear that except the top three foreign banks in the country, most head-offices viewed India as a Roman outpost. So, when you have a over a good decade of working life ahead, having made a nest for yourself and family, it was time to turn entrepreneurial.

Vishwavir Ahuja Managing Director and CEO of RBL Bank and Murali Natrajan Managing Director and CEO, DCB Bank

Like Ahuja and Sobti, you have others who read the tea leaves right — former Standard Chartered Bank (StanChart) duo Murali Natrajan and Shyam Srinivasan who now anchor DCB Bank and Federal Bank, respectively; and more recently in the non-banking financial company (NBFC) space, Jaspal Singh Bindra at Centrum Capital and Gunit Chadha at APAC Financial Services — all of whom saw it fit to chance the Swedish proverb, “Luck never gives; it only lends”.

If you look closer as we enter the 25th year after new-age private banks were waved in, it’s clear that crafting a legacy is tough. Ramesh Gelli’s Global Trust Bank played wildly and got merged with Oriental Bank of Commerce. The Jains of Times Bank handed over the keys to Aditya Puri of HDFC Bank early on; so too, the late Dev Ahuja of Centurion Bank. And fortunes changed at Axis Bank (UTI Bank earlier) only after P J Nayak took over from Supriyo Gupta. 

In recent times, we had Chanda Kochhar at ICICI Bank, Shikha Sharma at Axis Bank and Rana Kapoor at YES Bank, who would have surely planned for a much longer stay at the crease.

The trend of white knights in banks (ironically in a new one) started with Rana Talwar, the former global head of StanChart, with his Sabre Capital in Centurion Bank in April 2003.

 But it still begs the question: if those who started out on a brand-new slate (or relatively in some cases) left it with squiggles all over, what’s it that makes you take up the task of cleaning it up and writing anew on it? 

The moonwalkers

“Did you pose this question to Aditya Puri? asks Natarjan. Puri had given up his stock options at Citibank to roll out HDFC Bank, but then he had the backing of Housing Development Finance Corporation. DCB was an old private bank, promoted by the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED) in 1932, which had found itself on the wrong side of Mint Road. 

Natrajan has little patience for such details: “Foreign banks can be boring places. You have to listen to somebody in London, New York or Singapore telling you what’s a good or bad business idea. Here was my chance to be an entrepreneur.”

For Srinivasan, it was about engaging with life more meaningfully. Ask him about his shift to Federal Bank, and he will tell you: “The board of the bank was looking out for a person. Egon Zehnder contacted me. And I said, yes; that’s it.” 

He moved behind the desk that Natrajan got up from, at StanChart. Says he, “If money was the issue, I would not be doing what I am doing now. In the better-run foreign banks, the processes make you what you are. At Federal, I had to do it the other way around. I will still give myself six on 10 as a banker.” And then adds: “Now, these are dangerous things to say at this stage in my career but you get the drift.”

The crowd that dares to walk alone is getting bigger as the years pass.

In 2005, Bindra cut a cheque of $3.3 billion for StanChart’s purchase of Korea First Bank. “Nowadays, I chase investors for Rs 50-100 crore,” says the Centrum Capital executive chairman and former group executive director at the UK-based bank. 

It’s the price you pay to chisel a legacy beyond printing just a new business card. This is also what drove Chadha, the former boss of Deutsche Bank’s Asia-Pacific operations, to set up an NBFC — APAC Financial Services.

It’s also important to note that the professional could be done in by what’s on the margins. 

The first to follow Puri was not Natrajan, but Amitabh Chaturvedi — he was one of Anil Ambani’s top professionals at Reliance Capital. His life changed in October 2008 during the course of a meeting with Dhanlaxmi Bank’s chairman G N Bajpai (also former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India). 

A year earlier, the Reserve Bank of India had read out the riot act to Raja Mohan Rao, who had held a 36.69 per cent stake in the bank, but the blessings of the most famous resident at Thrissur (Kerala)-based bank at Guruvayoor Temple, Lord Krishna, did not help beyond a point — Rao was done in by the bank’s unions. P R Somsundaram at Laxmi Vilas Bank, who had come in from StanChart-STCI Securities as its managing director, also couldn’t pull it off. What it tells you is that, well, luck only lends!

Says Natrajan: “My first days in office (at DCB) were depressing. I knew what had to be done, but had to figure out where to start from. And then I got this mail from someone whom I can’t recall. It said, ‘Don’t let what you cannot do stop you from doing what you can do.’ And out of nowhere, it cleared by up everything in my head for me.”

The roll-call of successful bankers — or those who have batted out of NBFC platforms — are more than five for sure, but not yet more famous than Enid Blyton’s creation. 

But then, who’s said it is easy to learn to draw by doodling on the margins in life’s school.