A five-member jury selects him for Axis Bank’s sterling performance in 2008-09.
P J Nayak, former chairman and CEO of Axis Bank, is the Business Standard Banker of the Year for 2009. Nayak was the unanimous choice of a five-member jury led by H N Sinor, former CEO of the Indian Banks’ Association.
Though it’s almost nine months now that Nayak has stepped down from Axis, the jury felt he richly deserved the award for the bank’s stupendous performance in 2008-09 when he was in charge. The jury also said one of the key factors for judging the success of a CEO should be how the organisation fared even after he left.
By the time he resigned, the retail assets of India’s third largest private bank accounted for 20 per cent of the total portfolio, while the share of current and savings account balances in total deposits had risen to over 43 per cent.
During his nine-year stint at Axis, the bank outperformed its peers by posting a 48.75 per cent compounded annual growth rate for net profit. Return on assets, too, improved significantly from 0.77 per cent in March 2000 to 1.44 per cent in March 2009.
Apart from Sinor, the other members of the jury were Aditya Birla Financial Services CEO Ajay Srinivasan, J P Morgan India Chief Economist Jahangir Aziz, Mahindra & Mahindra Chief Financial Officer Bharat Doshi and Tata Consultancy Services CFO S Mahalingam.
What is the key to the success of this bureaucrat-turned banker who holds a Master’s Degree in Economics and a Doctorate from Cambridge? Nayak himself provides the answer. In an interview with Business Standard, the details of which has been published in the Banking Annual being distributed with today’s edition, Nayak said, “Banking is not rocket science. You need customer-empathetic people with a commonsensical head on their shoulders”.
That’s the reason Nayak stuck to the basics of banking even when others were lending aggressively. He followed a system of scoring sheets to assess credit-worthiness instead of granting credit cards and personal loans in large numbers. The bank also stayed away from businesses such as two-wheeler loans and small-ticket personal loans, fearing defaults.
The Banking Annual also covers a round-table discussion involving the CEOs of seven leading banks on the topic: "Life after the Crisis". The panelists were State Bank of India Chairman O P Bhatt, ICICI Bank MD & CEO Chanda Kochhar, Axis Bank MD & CEO Shikha Sharma, Union Bank of India Chairman M V Nair, HSBC India CEO Stuart Davis, Standard Chartered CEO Neeraj Swarup and Citibank India CEO Mark Robinson.
The consensus was that 2010 will be a challenging year when managing liquidity is going to be a big issue in a volatile market. But the opportunities are also limitless because this year is expected to see growth in investment as well as consumption.
