Do your work and go home: Aditya Puri on leadership without frills

What made you take the leap of faith from Citibank in Malaysia, at a time when everybody was aspiring to work abroad, to join what was essentially a startup bank—and this was much before the word startup existed?

So, there were multiple factors involved. First, when you work for a large multinational, you really don’t know whether your success is dependent upon the procedures and the brand, et cetera, of the multinationals. So it was an opportunity to actually put together something from the scratch, and we all had very high ambitions, where we said, why can’t we create a world-class Indian bank, starting from zero? Then we had a situation that still applies today. We found that we had the public sector banks that had the brand, distribution, and the money. And we had the private banks, plus the foreign, which were at that point of time, really only foreign banks. They had the product and the service, and they were making hay—and I was one of them. You made supernormal profits. So we said, what if we can get together the strengths of a public sector bank in terms of distribution, in terms of reach, in terms of funding, and the strengths of a foreign bank in terms of customer focus, products, service, and efficiency? We should have a winner.