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

At the ninth edition of Mint India Investment Summit, Puri received the Lifetime Achievement Award and engaged in a candid fireside chat with editor-in-chief Ravi Krishnan. From why he moved to India in 1994 to artificial intelligence in banking and the work culture he batted for, this chat covered a wide range of subjects. Edited excerpts:

If you were 25 years old today with a degree in commerce, would you still join banking?

I think India is still a very under-penetrated market as far as finance is concerned. So, opportunities are phenomenal. Fundamentally, I would be as excited. That time, we had the public sector and private sector. The public sector has come up, but ultimately demand exceeds supply in financial services. You have the ability now to meet that demand more easily at a lower cost because fundamentally, you are looking at a customer-focused organization that is agile, resilient, efficient and transparent. There were a different set of opportunities available at that time.

Now, you have semi-urban and rural India, which is not penetrated; you have the ability to use the information that is available to fundamentally transform the business. I think banking will be transformed. At the moment, there is too much hype, but AI is here to stay. But it's not as if everything is going to be implemented overnight, and there is too much negative hype on job losses. But would I join banking? Yes, because I didn't do engineering!

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.

When he (Deepak Parekh) told me the salary, I was going to fall into my pool. I said, Deepak, you must be joking, because that's what my driver was paid in Malaysia. I said, all this big talk is very good. I am happy to come on two conditions—one, I will be able to follow my passion, which would mean that I need to be clear who is going to run the bank.

Was there any milestone you had set for yourself that within two-three years, or five years, if I don't reach this, I will say, leave it, and go back?

At that time, I had a salary of two-and-a-half million dollars, and I am not a fool to leave it and come and take this. We had a 95% chance of success, at least in our mind, then if God's grace was not there, that would be a different thing. So we knew we will make it big.

It is very difficult to encapsulate 26 years in a short answer. But what would you say were the defining moments that shaped HDFC Bank's journey in your mind?

See, what shaped HDFC Bank was two things. One is when I came back from Malaysia, and we were in this broken down office, telling people we're going to make a world-class bank that will be the best in India, we didn’t know whether people believed or not. But I knew—I'd worked for a long time in Citibank—that if we got the right people, we set the right culture, check if is there a market, can we access the market, can we make our profit, are people available to make that a reality, is the technology available, and what do we want to create?

I probably was the public face of two and a half lakh people, but I'd be very arrogant and egoistic if I said I achieved it. It would be very arrogant of you to presume you know everything. So, we would only succeed if each one knew his job, whether it was the technology guy, whether it was the credit guy, whether it was the marketing guy.

As a leader, what do you think is the most critical ingredient in building a culture?

It is very simple. We are saying we are customer-focused. We'll make the customer happy. We will have the right product mix. We'll be transparent. We will have integrity and we'll take care of all our shareholders.

Coming from a foreign bank, the first thing I said was look, you do your work, you go home. You work late, it's your problem—at 5.30 pm, I'm going. I'm not watching you and you don't have to come and give me a Diwali present, and I want this to follow right down the organization. No Diwali present, no entertaining of the boss. I have enough. I can't even meet all my friends. Why would I come to your party? You do your work, you go, here is the system and that's what it is.

Now, coming to AI—is it going to be marketing, fraud detection or credit underwriting? Where do you think AI will have the biggest impact?

So, if you look at the origin, it started with automation, then you have machine learning, which is regular AI. Then came generative AI. All artificial intelligence prior to now was deterministic. You accessed a preset data warehouse with pre-set questions and the same answers came. I would say you asked the same question to a large language model today at 10 minute intervals and you'll get three different answers. That is because they are being fine-tuned. Then you need a human being to validate it. You need a human being to apply his mind to see ethical considerations, data security, cyber security, prompt engineering so that you can actually use AI properly.

This is just the raw material. When you get the output, you need to…there's a whole new set of jobs coming. So now, you have the prompt engineer. He has to be familiar enough with the tools to ask the language model the right questions, so that you get the answer. Then you have the context engineer, who makes sure that everything is taken into account before it goes into the system. Then, you have the technologist. Then you have a different data scientist, because now you're not building all models from the top, you'll build something from there, on top of that. That's where the Indian companies would come.

What AI tool do you use personally?

So, I use ChatGPT Pro, because I ask them everything that I want to know. Otherwise, I have to go to The Economist. That is one part of it. Two, when the bank went in for a 10-second loan, seven years back, that was Agentic AI. Instead of vertical, you had horizontal processing. So, if you're asking personally, there's so much knowledge to be gained. So I use it regularly. Every time I don't know something, I go there. You have to define what your problem is, and how you're going to solve it, and monitor it, etc.

Please understand, a phone is an access device. It's not technology. Technology is understanding the simple things I'm telling you. What can it do for you? How will you get it done? And where is the result?

You’ve always been a structural bull as far as India has been concerned. How are you analyzing India's economic prospects?

Let’s split this into two—medium and long term. Fundamentally, everybody agreed that we would achieve our $7 trillion economy, which was the World Bank, the IMF, all these great economists who say subject to other things being equal, all of them said it would be achieved. It was based on some fundamental facts that we have a strong foundation, both in terms of inflation, fiscal deficit, current account deficit, and now a good banking system without the problems.

We've also got the infrastructure, that is electricity, water, and roads to most parts of the country. What needs and what lots of studies would say, what would take you to the $7 trillion? We have to focus on manufacturing. I think that focus is coming about. That focus will have three or four pillars to it. One is obviously the PLI is a good thing. Second is the supply chain. Third is semi-urban and rural India, where most of the SMEs are. And then, you have the new businesses that will come up, because we have the infrastructure for public good. So that is one aspect.

Two is the logistical part. We have about 14% of GDP as our logistic cost. It has to come to single digit. Ports, airports, trains, simplifying. When it will happen, we may take a little longer, but it will be there.

Then, I think a lot of people have not realized is our focus on non-fossil fuels and alternative sources of energy has actually put us in a damn good position. Then, I think a lot of people have not realized that our focus on non-fossil fuels and alternative sources of energy has actually put us in a damn good position. It was about 5 billion barrels 10 years back. It's about 5.75 or 6 billion barrels today. So, there's only a 20% increase. So the fossil fuel intensity has already gone down, and it will go down further, you know, in 10 years, whereas the economy has more than doubled.

We've also got for our energy needs, we've got alternative supplies. So, we didn't have Russia, we now have 35% (of our crude imports). That's why they can confidently say that price may be an issue, but fundamental availability will not be that much of an issue. And so, we've got our sources tied up. I was very happy to hear that the government said, if you don't go in for piped gas, we'll cut off your LPG connection. You can't expect the government to do everything, but in the pipe gas, you can have it locally manufactured and you can even use biogas.

I think we handled the Middle East situation excellently, both diplomatically and as to what should be done. The fact is we didn't start the war, but once it is there, we've done the best we could. Look at the countries around you. I mean, give the government a pat on the back when it's due.