But, as the 14th Business Today-KPMG survey of India’s Best Banks reveals, there’s one bank that continued to roll better than all others: HDFC Bank. Once again, for the fifth year in a row, the Aditya Puri-led bank beat 76 others to emerge as the #1 player in the industry.
How does it do it? After all, HDFC Bank isn’t the biggest private bank in the country; ICICI Bank is. It isn’t the most profitable (measured in terms of operating profit per employee) big private bank; Citibank is. And it isn’t the most efficient user of capital (measured in terms of return on capital employed); state-owned bank, the State Bank of Travancore is.
So, what makes Puri’s HDFC Bank the top dog? The fact that across the more than two dozen parameters that the BT-KPMG study considers, HDFC Bank is a more consistent performer. That is, the 13-year-old bank manages all aspects of its business much better than other banks do. It’s a difficult balancing act to do—for example, ensuring both growth and quality of assets—but HDFC Bank seems to have figured out how to do it.
However, HDFC Bank retaining its top position isn’t the most surprising part of the BT-KPMG study findings this year. Rather, it’s ICICI Bank’s drop from #2 to #9. Historically a close competitor of HDFC Bank on our rankings, ICICI has slipped several notches, widening the gap between itself and its archrival. Does it mean that HDFC Bank is stealing a march over the K.V. Kamath-led ICICI? Ironically, no. What the numbers reveal is only the aggressive strategy that the latter, already India’s biggest private bank, is following to increase its lead.
Consider: the three-year compounded annual growth rate in deposits at ICICI is a whopping 50 per cent compared to HDFC Bank’s 31 per cent; its three-year CAGR growth in advances, too, is a high 47 per cent compared to HDFC Bank’s 38 per cent. So, what ICICI is doing is focussing on growth, taking on slightly more risk than HDFC Bank in the hope that cornering customers will not only allow it to cross-sell more products to them (and hence higher profit), but also make it more expensive for its rivals to break away customers from its fold. ICICI’s focus on growth is evident from its cost-toincome ratio. At 53.25 per cent, compared to HDFC Bank’s 46.32 per cent, ICICI’s cost-to-income ratio is the highest among the top 20 big banks.
Industry experts don’t expect that to be a major issue; they say that the bank has already learnt how to manage unsecured lending much better than several of its rivals, and will only get better in the years ahead. Among the large foreign banks, HSBC emerges as the surprise leader. It has jumped three places from last year to #2, making it the best foreign bank in the country.
What is Nainal Lal Kidwai, the bank’s CEO, doing right compared to her MNC competitors? To put it simply, she has a strategy that is not too different from Puri’s at HDFC. Both of them are growing their banks nicely, but at the same time ensuring that their assets generate good returns and don’t turn bad. Result: HSBC’s net NPA-to-net advances ratio is a low 0.43 per cent, compared to 1.02 per cent of Citibank and 1.43 per cent of Standard Chartered. Its return on assets at 1.54 per cent is the second highest among the top 10 big banks (Standard Chartered tops at 2.32 per cent).
Finally, who are the category winners? Punjab & Sind Bank emerges as the best small bank (balance sheet size less than Rs 24,000 crore), Axis Bank and YES Bank take the title of the fastest growing big (balance sheet size in excess of Rs 24,000 crore) and small bank, respectively, while Federal Bank and Karur Vysya Bank retain their honours as the most efficient big and small bank, respectively.
Fastest growing small bank - Yes Bank
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YES Bank is also moving deeper into financial services in areas such as investment banking, asset reconstruction, asset management (read: mutual funds) and also private equity. “We are looking at organic opportunity in all our businesses,” says Kapoor, former head of Rabo India Finance.
— Anand Adhikari
Fastest growing big bank - Axis Bank
— Mahesh Nayak
The most efficient big bank - Federal Bank
Alongside its banking activities, the bank is active in distribution of third-party mutual funds, and life and non-life insurance products that fetch its fee-based income.
— K.R. Balasubramanyam
The most efficient small bank - Karur Vysya Bank
Karur Vysya is one of the older private sector players but a relatively new convert to technology (it introduced core banking solutions in 2005). Just the same, the Tamil Nadu-based bank has lost no time in leveraging technology to expand and become efficient. Currently, the bank has 281 branches (and will expand to 300 in next two months), 279 ATMs of its own including 18 in rural areas and 108 in semi urban areas, and piggybacks on 10,000 other ATMs. Still, the bank is keen to build its physical presence. It plans to increase the number of branches to 300 shortly and create a pan-India presence.
“We find value in increasing branches and this is reflected in our results,” says Chairman P.T. Kuppuswamy, adding that such a strategy also helps Karur reach out to customers who are not computer savvy. Karur also runs a tight ship. Its NPA as a percentage of net advances in 2006-07 was a minuscule 0.23, although the more recent figure puts it at 0.05 per cent. “We are in no hurry really, but in the next quarter we can bring it down to zero,’’ says Kuppuswamy, whose bank also had one of the lowest cost-to-income ratios of 41 per cent.
— Nitya Varadarajan
Best small bank - Punjab & Sind Bank
— Manu Kaushik