In its 16th year, the Mint Annual Banking Conclave has been rechristened the Mint BFSI Summit and Awards, where 14 awards would be given away on 11 January based on decisions made by a stellar jury of well-known names in the financial sector.
The five-member jury comprised R. Doraiswamy, managing director, Life Insurance Corporation; Cyril Shroff, managing partner, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas; Keki Mistry, additional and non-executive (non-independent) director, HDFC Bank; Amish Mehta, managing director and chief executive, Crisil Ltd; and Nithya Easwaran, managing director, Multiples Alternate Asset Management Pvt. Ltd.
Mint’s knowledge partners in this exercise were howindialives.com and Fisdom.
Mint presented before the jury the mathematics and rankings in all categories based on public data. The jury then brought in the qualitative and market intelligence aspects into the conversation to pick winners in each category. Lasting for nearly two hours on a Saturday afternoon in December, the closed-door meeting saw the jury intensely deliberate before deciding on the winners. Some members recused themselves in certain segments to avoid conflict of interest.
Moreover, just because the data ranked someone at the top did not mean the jury had to settle for it as the winner. In a few categories, the jury decided to pick the second or even the third-ranked (by data) as they believed it to be qualitatively ahead. In fact, the jury chose the number four as the winner in one category.
Neither Mint nor our knowledge partners had any say in the selection of the winners.
The categories were: large bank; mid-sized bank; small bank; small finance bank; large non-banking financial company (NBFC); mid-sized NBFC; small NBFC; large life insurer; mid-sized life insurer; large non-life insurer; mid-sized non-life insurer; standalone health insurer; actively managed equity mutual fund (MF); and actively managed fixed income MF.
The jury unanimously decided to drop three categories. One and two being best fintechs in online payments and in digital lending, owing to the paucity of available data and information. And three, a fund house based on innovation, where the jury believed that the absolute returns of schemes in contention should cross a certain threshold.
“It was a wonderful jury deliberation and was a good mix of data and research that ranked the potential participants in the industry. At the same time, there were a lot of subjective factors, including digital adoption, governance, inclusion and reputation,” said Easwaran.
The awards come in the backdrop of India looking to achieve the target of $5 trillion in gross domestic product (GDP), with the financial services industry playing a crucial role in economic growth.
Crisil’s Mehta said if one looks at the GDP growth and the $5-trillion target, one is going to look at the growth driven by infrastructure and capital expenditure on the investment side, and the only way to build that is through investments on both equity and debt. “I think debt is going to be a large part of that growth journey, and would mean that BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) as a segment is going to be a key constituent needed to achieve that growth trajectory,” said Mehta.
Others agreed on the role of financial services in supporting and propelling economic growth.
“It is an established fact that BFSI plays an important role in the building of the economy. Particularly in India, BFSI has been playing a great role, at least in the last 5-10 years, and towards that its contribution needs to be recognized and taken forward,” said Doraiswamy.
Jury members also said awarding players in the BFSI sector would motivate them. “I think the financial sector has such an important role to play that if we can recognize the right and good players in the sector, it encourages them to provide better services for the nation,” said Mistry, adding that in his four-decade career, he has not seen India in such a strong position as right now.
Meanwhile, Shroff said the award would be something that players in the sector would look forward to. He added that the $5-trillion target is quite achievable, given the number of tailwinds in India’s favour. “The awards will give relevant impetus to players,” he said.
