Tamal Bandyopadhyay

A Bank for the Buck

FEATURES EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW with SUBRATA ROY EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SUBRATA ROY AND SAHARA INDIA PARIWAR, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK… Sahara: The Untold Story is based on painstaking research to demystify India’s most secretive and largely unlisted conglomerate, the Sahara India Pariwar. It also delves into the group’s ongoing legal battle with the market regulator. Entrepreneur Subrata Roy, the guardian angel of the group, whose feet are touched by everybody in the Pariwar, wants to reach out to a million lives and feels impeded and shuttered in by regulations. So the clash with the regulators was inevitable. But when a regulator slams one door, maverick Roy opens another. This play has been on since 1978, when Sahara was set up. Roy is well known for glamour and his association with film stars, cricketers and politicians. He exudes patriotism, with a statue of Bharat Mata (the presiding deity of the group) on a chariot driven by four fierce-looking lions adorning his headquarters in Lucknow. He is the Robin Hood of a country where only 35% of the adult population has access to formal banking services. This India and its millions of illiterate poor depositors stand in awe and admiration of him. But does he also exploit them? Do these poor people actually keep money with him or are they fronting for others? EXCERPT FROM THE SAHARA INDIA PARIWAR DISCLAIMER ‘The book at best can be treated as a perspective of the author with all its defamatory content, insinuation and other objections, which prompted us to exercise our right to approach the court of law in order to save the interest of the organization and its crores of depositors and 12 lakh workers.’ TamalBandyopadhyay, a deputy managing editor of Mint, is one of the most respected business journalists in India. Tamal has kept a close watch of the financial sector for over a decade and a half and has had a ringside view of the enormous changes in Indian finance and banking over this period. His first book, A Bank for the Buck, released by P Chidambaram in November 2012, has been a non-fiction bestseller.

The Untold Story

Sahara

FOREWORD BY NANDAN NILEKANI “Tamal combines his financial knowledge, eye for detail, and an excellent storytelling style to create a vivid portrait of India’s most valued bank and its path to the future.” NANDAN NILEKANI, Co-founder and Chairman of Infosys and Founding Chairman of UIDAI (Aadhaar) “Tamal has enthusiastically documented the epiphany that HDFC Bank’s leadership had in starting out on their digital journey. India is set for seismic changes to day-to-day banking over the next few years and banks who don’t commit to fully re-engineering their practice around becoming a technology company that delivers real-time, contextual banking experiences will wither on the vine. HDFC Bank has made a solid start on this journey, but the final chapter has not yet been written.” BRETT KING, Founder, Moven and bestselling author of Bank 4.0 The seeds of change were sown in September 2014, when HDFC Bank MD Aditya Puri went to Silicon Valley to meet the brightest tech minds in the world. By the time he got back, he knew exactly what needed to be done. It was time for a revolution. Instead of waiting to be disrupted by fintech companies, HDFC Bank went all out to disrupt itself, recasting its role and scope on a scale that has never been attempted before. In one of the biggest transformations ever undertaken in any business, HDFC Bank wants to become a platform facilitating a financial experience. Tamal Bandyopadhyay chronicles HDFC Bank’s own digital disruption exercise through the very people who drove it, narrating a story that’s as compelling as unique in India’s financial system. With his keen eye for detail, deep knowledge of banking and unparalleled storytelling ability, Bandyopadhyay recounts the journey of India’s most valued lender from a life cycle bank to a lifestyle bank. TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY is a bestselling author, award-winning columnist and a keen observer of the Indian banking sector for over two decades.

HDFC Bank 2.0

‘The Reserve Bank of India would like to assure the General public that Indian Banking system is safe and stable.’ – RBI Statement, 1 October 2019 Why did India’s central Bank have to issue an unprecedented statement to that effect? In Pandemonium: The Great Indian Banking Tragedy, bestselling author Tamal Bandyopadhyay takes you in search for the answer. It is a definitive insider story on the rot in India’s banking system – how many promoters easily swapped equity with debt as bank managements looked the other way to protect their balance sheets, until the RBI began waging a war against ballooning bad loans. The same troubles quickly spilled over to India’s mushrooming non-banking financial companies, which were quick to spot the post-demonetisation easy liquidity and banks’ reluctance to lend, prompting them to make the cardinal sin of borrowing short to lend long. What really ails public sector banks, the backbone of India’s financial system? Is it the government ownership itself, or how this owner actually behaves? And just when many were rooting for privatisation as a way out, powerful bankers such as Chanda Kochhar and Rana Kapoor exposed the soft underbelly of seemingly more efficient and profitable private banks of India. A timely and insider look at dramatic forces reshaping banking in Asia’s third-largest economy, this book is a bird’s-eye view of Indian banking and also a fly-on-wall documentary. A must-read to understand contemporary India’s challenges and economic potential.

Pandemonium: The Great Indian Banking Tragedy

This is the story of Bandhan, the only bank that emerged in eastern India after Independence. Founded by the son of a sweet vendor, with a mere Rs 2 lakh, the sum total of his life savings. On 17 June, 2015, Chandra Shekhar Ghosh stepped out of the Reserve Bank of India building in Mumbai with the much-coveted banking licence, beating some of the country's top corporate houses. This moment compensated for all the frustrations that had come along the way. A year later, Bandhan Bank was launched with 6.7 million small borrowers. So, how did Ghosh build India's biggest MFI from scratch and then, along with his team, transform it into a universal bank? Bandhan: The Making of a Bank chronicles that journey. This is also Ghosh's personal story-of a boy growing up in small-town Agartala struggling with poverty, but relentless in his ambition to make it big. He battles competition, hostile moneylenders, a tough economic climate and the perpetual lack of resources. Nobody in India perhaps knows better than him the psyche of a small borrower and the alchemy of doing business with the poor, profitably. This is one of India's biggest entrepreneurial stories.

Tamal Bandyopadhyay

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