India

When Vishwavir Ahuja took over as managing director and chief executive of Ratnaker Bank in 2010, the lender was a small operator based in the Maharashtrian city of Kolhapur. Along with a group of veteran dealmakers and operators who cut their teeth at Citi or alongside him at BAML, Ahuja transformed RBL (as the lender was re-branded) into a national operator, investing heavily in its public image and in digital banking.

It hasn’t been the best of times for Punjab National Bank. A colossal fraud spotted in February 2018 came at a bad time for both the bank and for a government keen to sort out its troubled state banks.

Founded in 2004, Yes Bank embraced new thinking from the outset. It saw early on that it would benefit by honing its marketing message and making its brand and branches look consistent and attractive. But it is in serving the country’s army of small and medium-sized enterprises that it really stands out.

A good way to identify the best digital provider in any market is to ask the market. When Asiamoney sat down in early 2019 with the chief executives of India’s banks and asked them to identify the best provider of digital banking services, the answer came back crisp and clear: HDFC.

Wealth management in India is intensely competitive – and for good reason. The number of high net-worth families is set to double by 2025, to 500,000, with a total cumulative net worth of $5 trillion. At least half of that additional wealth will be created by first-generation entrepreneurs, led by the country’s digital barons. Meanwhile, India is reckoned to have between 40 and 45 family offices, with average assets under management of $318 million. All those facts and figures are provided directly by Edelweiss Financial Services, the winner of this year’s award for India’s best provider of private wealth management.

India has been a tricky market for international banks to gauge in the years since the global financial crisis. Some have quit the market entirely while others have drastically streamlined their product range.

What makes Kotak Mahindra Bank so good? Is it that it never seems to have a bad year? That its long-term strategic decisions tend to be good ones – in stark contrast to some of its peers?

This is always a tough award to judge, in large part because being a dab hand in the capital markets does not automatically make a bank a great corporate lender.

RBL Bank has been transformed over the last decade, from parochial local lender to a second-tier bank with genuine national scale. Its investment in digital and data analytics, and its focus on financial inclusion, suggests it isn’t finished yet.