Kochhar’s Appointment Means More Women Reaching The Pinnacle of Indian Banking
ICICI Bank, India’s largest private lender named Chanda Kochhar as its new Chief Executive last week adding to the growing number of females who are part of the top ranks of the industry. Ms Kochhar is a member of an elite group of women bankers in India who run financial institutions including HSBC, ABN Amro, JPMorgan, UBS and ICICI’s insurance division.
The 47-year-old banker, started with ICICI as a management trainee, and replaces one of the country’s most respected senior bankers, KV Kamath, who will become ICICI’s non-executive chairman.
“She successfully led the bank’s wholesale and international banking businesses during a period of heightened activity and global expansion of Indian companies,” ICICI said of Ms Kochhar.
Ms. Kochhar takes the helm at ICICI during one of the most difficult periods the once high-flying private lender has faced in years. Shares in the bank, which has a market capitalisation of about $11bn, have fallen about 60 per cent this year after it suffered a near run on some of its branches. The group has been hit by the liquidity crunch in global markets and rising non-performing loans as Indian consumers and industry struggle with interest rates that have only recently started to come down from nine-year highs.
Other leading women bankers in India include Naina Lal Kidwai, the chief executive officer of HSBC in India and the first Indian woman to graduate from Harvard Business School; Meera Sanyal, chief executive of ABN Amro; Kalpana Morparia, who heads JPMorgan also ICICI alumni, and Manisha Girotra, the chairperson of UBS. JPMorgan’s head of investment banking is Vedika Bhandarkar and Kotak Mahindra Bank’s head of investment banking is Falguni Nayar.
Ms Kochhar joins only two other women to have risen to the top of an Indian domestic bank, according to research by India’s Mint daily newspaper. They are Ranjana Kumar, who took over at Chennai-based state institution Indian Bank in May 2000, and HA Daruwalla, who reached the top in 2005 at another state bank, Central Bank of India.In addition, two of the four deputy governors at the Reserve Bank of India, the banking regulator, are women.
ICICI has a tradition of awarding senior roles to women, who occupy about 40 per cent of the top positions at the bank. Aside from Ms Kochhar, ICICI’s board also has a female executive director, Madhavi Puri Buch, while its life insurance business and venture capital arm are both headed by women.
Bankers say Ms Kochhar is respected within the institution for her role in building the group’s retail business starting in 2000 and latterly in the international business. The retail business became an engine of growth for the former government development bank as it searched for growth beyond its traditional corporate and project finance focus.
However, Ms Kochhar must now face the challenge of scaling back the high growth of the retail portfolio and arresting rising bad loans, as well as making up for a liquidity crunch in the global markets that have affected its large international business.
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