Dear Reader,

Setting up a banking operation in India is tough and that is an understatement. One of the heavily regulated sectors, banks are put to test more often by the economy they service rather than the regulator that breathes down their every move. It is a tough sector to break even and generate profits, but tougher to not make mistakes as the long history of India’s lenders bungling every decade shows.

Indeed, from the rot in private sector banking that resulted in nationalisation in the late 1960s to the toxic loan crisis in 2015, banks have been engulfed in the flames of their bad risk assessments periodically. Besides these, there are always small fires that the regulator steps in to put out like the one two years ago where unsecured retail lending threatened to disrupt asset

See Full Page