PROJECT ON Entrepreneurial life of Ms.

Chanda Kochhar

FMS- WISDOM ,BanasthaliUniversity SUBMITTED TO:Gragi Pant SUBMITTED BY:Prabh Sharma(8103) Prabhjeet kaur(8002) Pragya Agarwal () Pranvi() Prachi() Pragati garg)(

Chanda Kochhar is currently the Managing Director (MD) of ICICI Bank and Chief Executive Officer (CEO). ICICI Bank is India's largest private bank and overall second largest bank in the country. She also heads the Corporate Centre of ICICI Bank. Early Life and Education Chanda Kochhar was born on 17th November 1961 in Jodhpur, Rajasthan. She then joined Jai Hind College in Mumbai for a Bachelor of Arts degree. After completing her graduation in 1982, she pursued cost accountancy (ICWAI). Later, she did her Master's degree in management studies from the esteemed Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai from where she received a Wockhardt Gold Medal for Excellence in Management Studies. In the same year, she won the J.N Bose gold medal for Cost Accountancy. She married Deepak Kochhar and has a son and a daughter. She is at present living in Mumbai. Career In 1984, after her masters, Chanda Kochhar joined 'The Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India Limited' or ICICI Limited as a management trainee. In her initial years in ICICI, she handled project appraisal and monitoring and various projects in Petrochemicals, Textile and Cement and Paper. She took part in the core team to set the bank in 1993. She became Assistant General Manager in 1994 and Deputy General Manager in 1996. She headed the infrastructure industry group of ICICI in 1996 and in 1998 she headed the Major Client Group that handled the top 200 clients of ICICI bank. The retail business was started by ICICI under the leadership of Chanda Kochhar in July 2000. She became the Executive Director of ICICI bank in April 2001.In April 2006, Chanda Kochhar was appointed as Deputy Managing Director of ICICI Bank. She managed the Corporate and Retail banking business of ICICI Bank. From October 2007 to April 2009, Kochhar was also the bank's Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Joint Managing Director (JMD) and the official spokesperson. CEO and MD of ICICI Bank Kochhar is CEO and MD of ICICI Bank from May 2009 for a period of five years. She succeeds K. V. Kamath, who was CEO of the bank since 1996.She is a director in ICICI International Limited and ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company Ltd. She is the chairperson of ICICI Bank Eurasia Limited Liability Company and ICICI Investment Management Company Limited. Kochhar is the Vice-Chairperson of ICICI Bank UK PLC and ICICI Bank Canada.

Outstanding steps taken by Ms. Kochhar at various phases of her professional life

The Meeting The 11th floor conference room in the South Tower at ICICI Banks headquarters has witnessed many stormy meetings. Like the one in progress that warm April day in 2008. KV Kamaths A-team : Chanda Kochhar, V Vaidyanathan, Madhabi Puri-Buch, K Ramkumar and Sonjoy Chatterjee had assembled there, a day before presenting the banks budget to the board. Kamath had told them they ought to focus on reining in costs. But a consensus seemed to elude the group. That was because Kochhar, widely tipped to take over from Kamath, was unconvinced. Everybody else in the room reckoned Rs 7,900 crore in operating expenses was a fair number. The debate went on, until abruptly, Kochhar stood up and said: With this kind of numbers, we wont have a bank to run next year. That said, she called the meeting to a close. A couple of hours of brainstorming later without Kochhar, they reassembled in the same room. We dont have an answer, executive director and group HR head at the bank K Ramkumar recalls the team telling Kochhar. What is the number we ought to be working on? Without blinking, she said Rs 6,500 crore. For a few moments, there was a stunned silence in the room. Essentially, she was telling them to maintain operating expenses at the previous years level.

A new paradigm

For as long as most people who have followed ICICI can remember, the bank has remained married to one mission: Aggressive growth. That is why when news started trickling out that a divorce is inevitable, when asked from Chanda Kochhar. Quite honestly, it was impossible to miss the firmness in an otherwise temperate voice. Growth, she said, can mean various things. It isnt just about growing the balance sheet. To seasoned ICICI watchers, this is the kind of language that qualifies for blasphemy the kind of thing an outsider with no clue of the banks institutional history would say. But then, we all know Chanda Kocchar is, The Insider. Shes seen it all: How her predecessor KV Kamath transformed ICICI from a crumbling development financial institution (DFI) to Indias most visible universal bank; how he grew its balance sheet five fold in less than a decade; and how he commands fanatic loyalty from the troops. But everything Kochhar is executing right now may seem to be at loggerheads with what her mentor believed in. Over the next one year, she intended to grow the balance sheet by just five per cent an unthinkably low number during the Kamath years. But now, she is battening down the hatches on two of Kamaths biggest bets plant the ICICI flag outside India and aggressively woo rural India.

The major reforms And remember the credit card and personal loan businesses? Kamath goaded the bank into war with global giants Citi and Standard Chartered and eventually toppled them a few years ago. One of the first things Kochhar did after taking over was to tell her colleagues to back off from these verticals and cut losses. Then there was this period when Kamath told a whole generation of Indians why visiting a bank doesnt make sense. Use ATMs instead, he urged. And to sell a creditstarved country all that a modern bank could offer, he recruited an army of direct selling agents (DSA). It was his way of getting around infrastructural deficiencies that could otherwise hamper ICICIs growth plans. Since the time Kochhar has taken over though, the emphasis at ICICI is to get people into branches. Folks at the bank used to working at its giant headquarters in Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai are being redeployed to run branches. And 70 percent of

ICICIs DSA operations have been wound up. By next year, the bank may no longer rely on any outsourcing for business acquisition and collections.

An unfamiliar world Last September, soon after Lehman Brothers collapsed, ICICI Bank faced an unprecedented crisis. Speculation mounted that its exposure to Lehman held enough potential to wreck the whole bank. Edgy traders hammered the stock down and nervous depositors queued up outside its premises to take their money back. It hurt us enormously when nobody believed our exposure was limited to $81 million, recalls Ramkumar. To manage the crisis, a war room was set up and the mantle fell on Kochhar to lead the exercise. It taught me a couple of things, she says. One, if there is a challenge, your shoulder ought to become broader and your back straighter. Confidence is important. Two, you have to be the sponge that absorbs stress. Else, it passes down to the team and they cannot function efficiently. It also sensitised the team to a type of risk they hadnt factored in before reputation risk. Until then, as bankers, they had only understood market risk, credit risk and operations risk. In some part, this was the outcome of yet another controversial sequence of events in the banks history. Just before this crisis played itself out, the team had battled another. Starting 2007, the bank came under fire in the media for allegedly using strong arm tactics to collect credit card dues. We perhaps misjudged the power of public perception around collections. And that impaired our ability to collect money, says Ramkumar. It finally forced the board, led by chairman N Vaghul and Kamath to dismantle the entire network of collection agents.

A new beginning 1) In part, this was possible because ICICI has just got the licences to open another 580 branches, over the 1,453 it already has. Of these, Kochhar has earmarked 20 for special status as mega branches. These will serve corporate customers as well. In some ways, this is how Axis Bank, State Bank of India and HDFC Bank function.

2) In the past, ICICI preferred to centralise operations while branches were manned by younger staffers. The outcome was poor turnaround time. The branch staff had little control over the outcome. In the new dispensation, a premium is being placed on the branches. Veterans from headquarters are being deployed to head them. A considerable amount of authority is being vested on them to solve customer issues at the branch itself. 3) At the same time, the bank is targeting the government sector, and even stock market participants to open current accounts to improve the CASA ratio. 4) The new branch licences are also a reason to wind down the direct marketing channel, a move that brings with it considerable pain. The channel was built over the years with assiduous wooing of partners. But now that the relationship has to be terminated, there is angst in the system. 5) Her biggest challenge is to meet market expectations. So far, to keep its high growth strategy intact, the bank has had to raise funds from the markets several times. Yet at 7.8 percent, the return on equity (ROE) has been poor. But she has promised an ROE of 15 percent over the next three years.

Her approach towards challenges She always moved ahead with a meticulous planning. Shes always firm about her objectives and readily accepts all the obstacles with a firm and determined hand to outstand them which comes in her way. A good farsighted, she always had an attitude of learning from past and thus making best out of coming futures challenges and converting them into opportunities.

Awards and Achievements Kochhar is honored with Padma Bhushan Award, the third highest civilian honour by the Government of India for the year 2010 for her services to banking sector. Kochhar personally was awarded "Retail Banker of the Year 2004 (Asia-Pacific region)" by the Asian Banker, "Business Woman of the Year 2005" by The Economic Times and "Rising Star Award" for Global Awards 2006 by Retail Banker International. Kochhar has also consistently figured in Fortune's list of "Most Powerful Women in Business" since 2005.In 2009, she debuted at number

20 in the Forbes "World's 100 Most Powerful Women list, and climbed to the 10th spot in 2010.she featured in Business Today's list of the "Most Powerful Women Hall of Fame. In 2011, she also featured in the "The 50 Most Influential People in Global Finance" List of Bloomberg Markets.

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