HDFC BANKS TECH-TONIC SHIFT
FOR FIFTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD CRICKET buff Sashidhar Jagdishan, the entry into the eighth-floor corner room of HDFC Bank’s Mumbai headquarters amidst the raging Covid-19 pandemic was like walking into the Sabina Park cricket pitch in the 1980s and facing a battery of West Indian fast bowlers. That’s how the new MD & CEO of the country’s second-largest bank often recounts his gruelling first 11 months to friends and acquaintances. The man whom iconic CEO Aditya Puri trained and tutored as his successor, faced a barrage of bouncers—technology glitches, disruption in banking services, a credit card acquisition freeze by the regulator Reserve Bank of India (RBI), an embargo on new digital product launches, compliance failures, a hefty penalty by the regulator, and the most challenging economic environment in the bank’s history. Jagdishan (fondly called Sashi by colleagues and friends), was often seen dousing fires working from home, and also taking care of his old parents.
But there was another story brewing that got lost in the din. Taking fresh guard, Jagdishan, who joined the bank as a finance manager in the mid-1990s, was constantly brainstorming with his senior management team to use the current taxing phase as an opportunity to start with a clean slate—especially the technology platform. Despite being an insider, Jagdishan discovered a frightening gap between what he knew about the bank over the shoulders of his predecessor, and what he encountered sitting in the hot seat himself. Part of the reason was the pandemic, which swiftly changed customer behaviour, forced a remote workforce culture, tested the bank’s business continuity plan, and also raised fears of cybersecurity risks.
“We are creating two factories—the enterprise factory and the digital factory—to be able to build new architecture, new designs on the cloud, which will ensure that we are able to compete with the fintechs and the platform players”
SASHIDHAR JAGDISHAN MD and CEO, HDFC Bank, at the lender’s AGM in July
The new job at hand was all about future-proofing and rewriting many old rules of running a bank. “My respect for Puri has gone up infinite times [considering] how he had steered the ship seamlessly,” Jagdishan once told a colleague. Under Puri, the start-up bank, founded in 1994, grew its numbers to ₹90,084 crore in net revenues, ₹31,116 crore in profits, ₹13.35 lakh crore in deposits, and ₹11.32 lakh crore of advances in FY2020-21, when).
