50 Years of Asia: Piyush Gupta
9 May, 201950 Years of Asia: Reuben Lai, Grab
9 May, 2019Euromoney, May 9 2019
Read the full article here: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1f7qlfss77kms/uday-kotak-finance-is-the-catalyst
Kotak Mahindra is a story of evolution. It started out in 1985 as a leasing and broking business, becoming an investment bank in the 2000s and eventually what they call internally ‘bank plus’, a full-service institution.
“We saw a very significant opportunity as India’s economy evolved over the last 30 years, and there was a deep belief that the financial sector in India would go through its own evolution and that there was space for private-sector financial intermediation,” says Uday Kotak, founder and chief executive, looking back to when he set up the institution in the 1980s.
Since then Kotak Mahindra’s story has somewhat mirrored India’s story. “As we have evolved, we have seen a closed market become a pretty vibrant financial market,” says Uday. “We came to a conclusion that India needs to be building strong financial institutions within the country.
Roughly 30 years later, from an outfit that started out as three members, we have 60,000 employees and have the whole range of financial services under our umbrella.”
Even in the early days when India grew at what used to be known as the Hindu growth rate, about 3.5%, Kotak had big ambitions.
“We always felt the financial sector had the ability to grow faster than the economy,” which in recent years has been a nominal GDP growth rate of 11% (seven outright plus four from inflation).
“We believe financial services, run well in India, could grow at 1.5 to 2 times nominal GDP, which takes you to between 16% and 20%+. We think that is sustainable because finance is going to be a very important catalyst in making the economy grow faster.”
Full article: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1f7qlfss77kms/uday-kotak-finance-is-the-catalyst?copyrightInfo=true
