BS Banker of the Year Award: High-powered Jury meets today to pick winner

A high-powered jury comprising an eminent former central banker and financial sector stalwarts will meet virtually on Thursday to select the winner of the Business Standard Banker of the Year award for 2021-22.

The jury will be chaired by SS Mundra, former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The other prominent members of the jury are HDFC Limited Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Keki Mistry, Aditya Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund Managing Director (MD) & CEO A Balasubramanian, ICAN Investment Advisors Chairman Anil Singhvi, and former MD & CEO of Bank of Baroda P S Jayakumar.

Sandeep Bakhshi, MD & CEO of ICICI Bank, was the Business Standard Banker of the Year 2020-21.

Filters using financial parameters were applied to shortlist the candidates for the final round of discussion. Size, growth in assets, liabilities, fees, pre-provision profit, interest income, and non-performing assets are some of the data points the jury will look at. Apart from qualitative aspects, subjective parameters – like adherence to RBI norms or how many times a lender was penalised – will also be high on the check-list.

The initial months of the financial year 2021-22 were marked by the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, which waned in the second part of the year before the third wave caused by the Omicron variant hit the country in December 2021-January 2022.

However, in the absence of any strict lockdowns like the first wave in 2020, economic activity remained resilient as reflected by a rebound in the real GDP growth, which was 8.7 per cent in 2021-22.

The banking sector was resilient in 2021-22 with improved profitability and adequate capital. Importantly, asset quality continued to improve during the year under review with most lenders achieving a reasonable level of provision coverage ratio – an indicator of the strength of the balance sheet.

The consolidated balance sheet of scheduled commercial banks registered double-digit growth in 2021-22, after a gap of seven years. Public sector banks continued to have the lion’s share in the balance sheet with 62 per cent deposit market share and 58 per cent loan market share.

“During 2021-22, the balance sheet of commercial banks expanded at a multi-year high pace,” the RBI had said on the banking sector’s performance in 2021-22.

“Timely policy support cushioned the impact of the pandemic on banks’ financial performance and soundness indicators. The legacy challenge of non-performing assets (NPAs) is easing, and profitability has been improving sequentially to levels last observed in 2014-15. This has been accompanied by lower slippages and the bolstering of capital buffers,” the regulator had said.

Commercial banks’ combined net profit grew 49.2 per cent on-year in 2021-22 to over Rs 6 trillion, the RBI data showed. Higher profits during 2021-22 were contributed by acceleration in income and contraction in expenditure, the RBI had said. The contraction in total expenditure of these banks was led by interest expenditure, which declined due to low deposit rates.