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Informist, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025

 

MUMBAI – Foreign banks are realigning their India strategy based on the change in consumer behaviour over the past few years. "The realisation dawned on us four years back or so that India of 10 years back is not the India of today," HSBC India Chief Executive Officer Hitendra Dave said Wednesday at Business Standard's BFSI Insight Summit.

 

"Significant amount of wealth, significant amount of affluence, significant amount of non-resident Indian population, significant number of Indians who send their kids abroad, a significant number of Indians who immigrated abroad, all that population was largely in the top 15-20 cities of the country," he said. However, in the past 5-8 years there has been an explosion of affluence, wealth, aspiration, and ambitions even in tier-III cities, Dave said. 

 

"As a business, our job is to follow where the customers are. We are grateful to the regulator for giving us the opportunity to serve our customers in 20 new cities. With these 20 new cities, we will be present in 34 cities overall and, hopefully, will be able to for the foreseeable future provide services to a certain section of the population," Dave said. The foreign lender will open these branches in a staggered manner.

 

Standard Chartered Bank India Chief Executive Officer P.D. Singh said the bank is focusing on large format branches to cater to its savvy and global clients. "We just inaugurated our largest eastern India branch, that also shows we are growing where we need to," he said. Branch formats have changed according to customer requirements, he said. Customers want large-format branches with secured and exclusive interface. However, the bank is open to the idea of merging some of its branches if they are close to each other.

 

Meanwhile, Citi India aims to provide service only to institutional clients in the country. Chief Executive Officer K. Balasubramanian said, "We have doubled down on institutional business post the retail business exit. The institutional business was (always) highly profitable, retail gave us the visibility and the brand but in terms of focus on the country that remains on the institutional side."  End

 

Reported by Sagar Sen

Edited by Rajeev Pai

 

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