ONE BANK, ONE TEAM, ONE GOAL
Under the stewardship of MD and CEO Sandeep Bakhshi, ICICI Bank is pursuing a people-focussed sustainable strategy for growth
mumbai-headquartered icici bank recently extended an invitation to former Indian hockey team captain Viren Rasquinha to meet its senior management team. In a talk, the 42-year-old Rasquinha enlightened them on how the game of hockey has transformed over the years. The players’ formation in the front and midfield changes continuously. The substitutes and the players on the ground have to continuously adapt, adjust and strategise on the fly. “He [Rasquinha] spoke about how the game has changed and how people are expected to have a very flexible mindset to survive and thrive in today’s hockey,” recalls T.K. Srirang, Group Chief Human Resources Officer, ICICI Bank.
In some aspects, the corporate world is evolving in a manner similar to how hockey and other sports are changing in today’s world. Customer preferences are changing fast, plus they want instant gratification. Companies are also trying to change and they want their workforce to have a mindset of upskilling continuously, thinking innovatively and being ready to take up challenging assignments. Rasquinha’s hockey analogy is also a fitting description of ICICI Bank’s proactive approach in the technology space, which reinforces the focus of the lender’s 117,200 employees on a common goal.
Under MD and CEO Sandeep Bakhshi, 62, the bank has revamped its HR policies, teams and work culture along the lines of ‘One Bank, One Team’. The whole concept of ‘one bank, one team’ is a fundamental pivot for the organisation. It has consciously moved away from the industry standard, individual key performance indicators-led model to a team-based one. “It is very difficult to attribute a particular outcome of the bank to one individual. It is, after all, a team effort and there are multiple teams operating across the bank,” explains Srirang.
The efforts are bearing fruit. ICICI Bank has emerged as No. 3 in the BT-Taggd Best Companies to
Work For in India ranking this year.
Step by step, the bank has moved towards its goal. On the path to digital banking and ‘Bank to BankTech’, it first identified the future technologies and selected five areas: DevOps, project management, APIs, cloud computing and data engineering. Last year, it expanded into three new areas: cybersecurity, data analytics and data visualisation. “We added design this year,” says Srirang.
After identifying the future technologies, the bank beefed up its tech expertise. First, it decided to tap the IITs to hire engineers. “We hired close to 400 engineers in the last financial year (FY22),” says Srirang. In FY23, too, the bank roped in a similar number of engineers. It’s unheard of for a bank to be inducting engineers into the risk, analytics and technology teams, but ICICI Bank has done so. It has multiple customised programmes curated under its Digital Academy to cover technology, data and design.
India’s third-largest lender by assets has also aligned its strategy of engagement with external experts. The bank has an initiative where it brings in people from diverse fields every month to speak with top management. In the past two years, it has focussed heavily on people from the digital space. Recently, Rajesh Jha, part of the senior management team at Microsoft, spoke to the bank’s leadership about the latest developments in the tech space.
Not just that. The bank also keeps updating its training module to be in sync with the latest technologies and processes. “I think the rate of change of the module is much higher now because our processes are changing rapidly,” says Srirang. The bank is already working towards decongesting its processes internally. “We need to make sure that those changes are reflected in the curriculum,” he adds.
The bank, which has 5,718 branches, also uses data science to decide which branch should be visited by the senior managers. The key deciding factors are audit score, experience of the branch manager, attrition in branch employees, etc. Bakhshi himself makes it a point to call branch managers and regional managers directly on a daily basis. “It helps in prioritising which branch needs immediate attention,” says Srirang. “Communication is a very important aspect... of this whole cultural transformation,” he says.
During a recent board meeting in Hyderabad, the bank invited former chairman Narayanan Vaghul
to spend some time with the 12-member board and share his perspective.
Vaghul narrated a story of G.L. Mehta, the bank’s second chairman, from 1958 to 1970. Mehta often said ‘Make sure every employee’s child is given the best of education so that they can go ahead and build a great career’. Vaghul said if there are two factors that will define ICICI Bank, they would be the lender’s customers and its people. That’s the DNA of ICICI Bank. “Customers and employees are the two fulcrums around which the leaders have to build the organisation,” Vaghul had said. That’s the core philosophy of the bank as well.