Mumbai: The mantra was simple, but hard to implement in an economy still criticised for its cronyism: friendship and banking are not correlated, and good friends representing bad business risk get nothing more than a coffee.
The remarks, made in the context of how he avoided lending to fugitive offenders Vijay Mallya and Nirav Modi, speak volumes about how the outspoken and witty banker born in Gurdaspur, Punjab, built a formidable institution from scratch over a 25-year journey that has no parallel in India.
While heading a foreign bank’s operations in Malaysia in the early 1990s, Puri got an offer from Deepak Parekh of mortgage major HDFC to come back to India to start a bank in an economy which had shifted gears with liberalization moves.
What awaited was hard days of working from a mill complex in central Mumbai’s mill land and hiring people who shared the audacious vision to build a world-class institution. Leaving behind the luxe life and dapper suits of foreign banks, Puri and his team at the upstart venture shared fizz drinks, wore a footwear brand popular among the middle class, shared a rat-infested space in a yet-to-be gentrified work space to plan and execute it.
Like other banks, it started out as a corporate-lending focused institution, but possibly prompted by changes happening in the economy witnessing becoming into a consumption oriented one, shifted focus to the retail segment for both advances, and low-cost deposits courtesy corporate salary accounts.
