"SuperBank- ICICI reinvents itself for the new 'E'conomy"-Rediff
Rise of a 'universal banking major' from India
There was a time when the Industrial Development Bank of India and Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India, along with the Unit Trust of India and Life Insurance Corporation, were considered the pre-eminent financial institutions of India. Consider these:
The other day, IDBI got knocked off India's premier stock market index, the Sensex of the Bombay Stock Exchange. UTI got embroiled in a controversy over the net asset value of its flagship US-64 and is still in the process of getting its act together.
Besides its significant but traditional role in the capital market, LIC has been busy shoring up its weak spots for the post-liberalisation insurance market (which may pit itself against big-time foreign players).
Among the four, ICICI, India's largest financial institution, has been going from strength to strength, constantly reinventing itself for the Internet-driven new economy. It is still part of the 30-share Sensex and is doing well on the New York Stock Exchange, the only Indian company to do so........
Kamath's efforts at cleansing and reorienting India's banking sector to global standards, have been recognised around the financial world. "People who hired well like ICICI have done a good job of building the right capital in humans and they are going to have huge benefits from it," Prof Sanjiv Ranjan Das of the Harvard University had once told rediff.com. Professor Bala V Balachandran, professor of accounting, information systems and decision sciences, Kellog's Institute of Management in the US, had this to say: "Companies like ICICI are doing much better than other banks because they are able to take advantage of the bigger capital that they have. And they are efficient at targeting the customer as against doling out funds to everybody. These companies don't grow just like that but rather in a focused way.
"Companies like ICICI have visionaries like K V Kamath at the helm. He is taking care of what's happening outside, the problems, the pitfalls, how to recover... That comes from leadership."
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