Bandhan: On the Way to Becoming a Bank

Typically, after six every evening, employees queue up near the lifts on the higher floors of the Bandhan headquarters at Salt Lake City to leave the office. Many come to work from faraway places. They leave home early morning and commute long hours to reach the office by 9 a.m.

The evening of 2 April 2014 was different, though. It was past 6 p.m., but nobody was in a hurry to go home. They were not busy with work either, even though everybody was glued to their computer screens, which displayed the RBI website. With impatience, they were refreshing the website repeatedly.

A few minutes after 6 p.m., Pappu Banerjee of Bandhan’s communications division screamed, ‘We got it.’ Instantly, Chandan Mukherjee, an accountant, lifted him on his shoulders and started running. There was a loud uproar on the fourth floor where the communications division, and a few others, run their offices.

Arpita Sen, deputy general manager, institutional finance team of Bandhan, rushed to the seventh floor, where Ghosh was holding a meeting with a few senior executives, and broke the news: ‘Sir, aamra peye gachi.’

From a list of twenty-five applications, RBI gave its nod to two—IDFC Ltd and Bandhan—to set up universal banks. It was an in-principle approval, and both would need to set up the banks within eighteen months, subject to the banking regulator’s final nod.

By the time all senior employees rushed to the eighth floor, where the boss sits, Ghosh was in no position to talk to them. He was juggling two mobile phones—reporters from newspapers and television channels were calling—and his two landlines were ringing non-stop.

Piyali Ghosh, his secretary, soon took charge and stopped passing most phone calls on his landlines as an excited Ghosh was moving all over the floor, talking to the media.

Company secretary Indranil Banerjee soon started calling the board members and Bandhan’s investors to give them the news. It went on till midnight, and by the time the senior executives left office, it was 1 a.m.

The next morning, they were greeted by a band party which Runu da had hired to celebrate. The band moved in and around Salt Lake, blaring popular Hindi songs, and some of the Bandhan employees, led by Runu da, dancing. Of course, it was not easy to arrange the band party. Narayan Chandra had put his foot down as he thought this would not go down well with the neighbours in the locality.

Ghosh addressed all employees at the conference room on the ninth floor, and asked them not to work that day and enjoy the moment. Sweets were distributed at the head office as well as on the field; there were flowers and gulal all over, and the nine-storeyed building was lit up in the evening. The euphoria continued for the next couple of days, until the weekend.

At the meeting, Ghosh highlighted the HR issues which would come up on the way of Bandhan transforming into a bank. He made it clear that banking would be a different ballgame, and the existing Bandhan staff neither had the qualification nor experience to steer the organization through this phase. It would need to hire bankers, and the staff should welcome them as teachers.

Tamal Bandyopadhyay is the author of two best-sellers --  "A Bank for the Buck" and "Sahara: The Untold Story". He writes a popular weekly column on finance, Banker's Trust, every Monday at Mint where he is a Consulting Editor. You can buy his new book "Bandhan: The Making of a Bank" here.

For more updates about the book follow: @bandhan_story