Chapter 7: Delightful Dubai and The Lure of Consumer Banking

This seventh extract from my unpublished memoirs ‘ The Adventures of an Itinerant Executive’ describes my time in Dubai and Mumbai where I learnt the nuts and bolts of the Consumer Banking business

Dubai was a far more cosmopolitan place than Riyadh. Women were permitted to drive and work in jobs of their choice. The place was buzzing with construction and business activity. The banking sector was highly competitive and growing. There was plenty to see and do in and around the Gulf and there were no restrictions on travel. Clearly this would be a good place to be for the next few years. I was offered the job with Standard Chartered as ‘ Head of Marketing – Gulf’ and accepted. We packed our household effects, sold the car and moved to Dubai in November 1994 after bidding my driver, Kumar, goodbye – but with a promise to try and get him to move to Dubai as well.

I was received at Dubai airport by one of the bank’s Product Managers, Harsh Munjal, in charge of the Liabilities business in the Consumer Bank, who would report to me. Harsh had worked earlier in American Express Bank in Delhi and knew Karti, slightly. Barely had I settled in to the car for the drive to the Hilton Serviced Apartments on Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai, my abode for the next month ( the apartment buildings are shown in the photograph at the top of this chapter) than Harsh emptied his cup of woes on to my lap. He was overworked, the bank was chaotic, the management had its shortcomings, he was fighting various battles with various people and so on. I could see that my role was not going to be an easy one. 

As I entered the apartment, there was a letter of welcome awaiting me from Samit Ghosh, along with a request to speak at a Seminar on Market Research in the Banking and Financial Services industry the following week. Fortunately, this was a subject that I was familiar with and after a few hours of work, my speech was ready. However, this was already a hectic start to my new job. The head of the consumer bank was Gautam Vir, a taciturn career banker and a new recruit from Citibank. He had put together a new team of ace bankers who were recruited mainly from Citibank and HSBC. This new team was learning to work with each other. The bank was in the throes of change and attempting to implement a host of process improvements and new product launches in the areas of auto loans, personal loans, credit cards, deposit products and ATMs. It was all fairly chaotic and exciting.

After a few weeks in the service apartment, we found ourselves a nice three - bedroom villa with a small swimming pool in the Umm Suqeim area of Dubai. With a generous furnishing allowance from the bank we were able to replace some of our old furniture and household equipment. We also made arrangements for our driver, Kumar to move from Riyadh to Dubai.

The Marketing department of the bank had not yet been properly set up and I was tasked with doing so. Fortunately, I had an able team of Product Managers to assist me. Suvo Sarkar, the Product Manager responsible for Assets (now heads the retail business at Emirates NBD in Dubai), while another, Sriram Padmanabhan is Chief Auditor – Technology for Citibank . Harsh went on to become head of the Consumer Bank at National Bank of Bahrain. Andy Drew, an Englishman was my head of PR & Communications

I was tasked with writing a Five Year Strategy and Plan document for the Consumer Business a week after I joined and before I had really understood the business. In this, I was ably assisted by Suvo and we produced an impressive document which became the blueprint for expansion of the business. The bank worked with an advertising agency called Fortune PromoSeven which was headed by Rajeev Budhiraja. Rajeev had a young and energetic team and they produced some excellent advertising campaigns for us. 

One of our initiatives was the introduction of Telephone Banking which was a fairly new concept at the time. The service was launched with an attractive ad, featuring a bright red space age telephone with the headline ‘ Banking at the Speed of Sound’ . We got a number of grateful messages from our customers who appreciated the convenience of the new service. The most interesting was from a customer who called our call centre and thanked them for the service but asked ‘ where in the telephone do I deposit my money ?’

 Another innovation was the introduction of doorstep banking through the moniker of ‘Room Service’ where we promised that a customer would not have to stir out of his home or office . A representative of the bank would visit the customer and handle his or her transactions.

The corporate colours of the bank were blue and green. We initiated a programme called ‘Neighbourhood Banking’ where we gifted each household in the immediate neighbourhood of our branches a green cactus in a blue pot along with a brochure about the bank’s services and an invitation to visit our main branch and have a cup of coffee with the branch manager. This generated a lot of goodwill for the bank among our immediate neighbours except in one case, where a lady rang the branch manager and complained that her cat ate the cactus and died!

Dubai has over 90 nationalities and the composition of the bank’s customer base reflected this. Apart from a large number of foreigners the bank also had a number of local UAE citizens as customers especially in the other Emirates of the UAE. One customer of our Al Ain branch followed a curious monthly ritual. He would visit the branch on the first of every month, withdraw all his money in cash ,count it and deposit it back into his account. He did not trust the bank’s statement which was mailed to him each month showing his account balance. 

Life in Dubai was interesting. Our social life was active. I became a member of the Metropolitan Club, a beach resort near our villa and played tennis there frequently with the billionaire owner – Khalaf Al Habtoor, who owned a string of businesses in the UAE. A popular pastime on weekends was ‘ Dune Bashing’ when a bunch of friends would get into their SUVs and drive on the highly uneven desert sands. This was an exhilarating experience since we would climb the dunes in our Mitsubishi Pajero at a very sharp angle and drive down equally steep slopes. This required a high level of skill and was not for the faint hearted.

One had to be careful to go with people who knew their way around the desert. It was easy to lose one’s bearings and get lost since the cars were not equipped with GPS systems and Google Maps had not been developed. A story did the rounds about a three Filipinos who decided to do some dune bashing on their own. It was a warm summer day. They got lost and were unable to find their way back to the main roads. After wandering around in the desert for several hours they got dehydrated and died. Their bodies were discovered several days later. Sadly, it was found that they were actually quite close to a highway but didn’t know it.

 I also played the occasional round of golf at two beautiful golf courses, the Emirates Golf Club and the Dubai Creek Golf and Yacht Club.

 A major project which I was given to handle was the launch of credit cards in the Gulf for Standard Chartered. Having a background in market research, one of the first things I did was to commission a market research study to decide the optimal combination of features my cards should offer. A cross functional team from the Marketing, Operations, Sales and Credit departments of the consumer bank, sat in a conference room and brainstormed for two days about all the possible features that we could offer, to beat our competitors (mainly Citibank and Mashreqbank) in the market place. All these ideas were collated and categorised and then converted to product ‘concepts’ which customers were asked to rate against each other. Using a complex mathematical technique called Multiple Conjoint Analysis the ‘ideal’ card with the optimal combination of features was determined. Traditionally the market for cards was classified into the ‘Silver’ and ‘Gold’ categories. We decided to change the rules of the game and introduced three variants , the Blue card, the Executive Card and the Gold card. This was a clever way of splitting the market for the Silver category into two and offering some buyers a product with more benefits, in the shape of the more upmarket Executive card.

One of my new product managers, Navneet Dave ( I had flown to Bombay to interview and hire him)  then set about the task of getting all the various alliances in place for promotional activities. Our Sales team organised the training of our sales force while the Operations team ensured that our card system was up and running well before the launch date. The launch was a success and by the end of the first week after launch we received a large number of enquiries and 600 applications for cards. The card business soon acquired over 30,000 customers. Since residents of the UAE were liberal spenders and had no compunction about borrowing against their cards to the hilt, the card business became quite profitable.

As the Head of Marketing, my job was to come up with innovative advertising with the help of our advertising agency. On one occasion, we launched a visually stunning campaign in the press which featured trees painted in blue and green with the headline  ‘The Power to Stand Out’. This was aimed at pointing out some new and different features of our range of credit cards. I was summoned by John Filmeridis the General Manager of the Middle East South Asia ( MESA) region of Standard Chartered (and Karti’s erstwhile super boss at American Express Delhi) and asked to explain why we had visuals of trees in green and blue when no such trees existed on the face of the earth. I explained that this was a visual metaphor and that this type of creative license was permitted in the world of advertising. However, I could see that this argument did not cut much ice with a hardened banker like John.

In the summer of 1994 the boys came to Dubai from boarding school in Ooty, India for their summer holidays and we decided to take them to Disneyworld in Florida. We had rented a bungalow in one of the lovely resorts near Disneyworld and got ourselves a five day pass to Disneyworld that was valid for life. This meant that one could see Disneyworld for three days as a teenager and come back twenty years later to use the pass for the remaining two days. Disneyworld in the summer can be exhausting. One stands interminably in long queues for a ride that lasts a few minutes and then begins the process all over again.

After day four, Arjun, who was fifteen years old by then had had enough. He refused to come out for our evening out saying that he was tired. We left him in the house and left looking for something to eat reminding him not to bolt the door from the inside. On our return we were unable to enter the house as Arjun decided to do exactly that. After walking around to the back of the house, I saw Arjun through a window, flat on the bed fast asleep. No amount of banging on the window would wake him up. Having no option, I had to break a window and let ourselves in to the house. Needless to say the resort charged me USD 200 for the damage. We still have the unused fifth day pass to Disneyworld. 

Karti was still employed by Capital Intelligence in Cyprus. In January 1996 she had a trip planned to visit officials in Sri Lanka’s Central Bank in Colombo. She had read some news about terrorist activity flaring up in Sri Lanka and at the last minute, decided to cancel her trip as she felt uneasy about the situation. On 31st January, a lorry carrying 440 pounds of explosives crashed into the Central Bank building driven by a suicide bomber. The explosion killed 91 people and injured 1400 others. 100 people lost their eyesight. Most of the windows of the Hilton Hotel nearby where she was booked blew out. Had she not cancelled her trip she would have been in the Central Bank when the attack took place

In October of 1996 Karti and I decided to take a short holiday in the Black Forest in Germany. We hired a BMW from Stuttgart Airport and drove to a quaint lodge in the Forest where we had rented a room. The lodge was empty except for another young Indian Marwari couple. We had planned a trip to the Rhine Falls, the tallest in Europe, the next day and invited them to come with us as they did not have their own transport. The falls were about an hour and a half away. As we came near the area the road narrowed and became a single lane. We reached a border check-post. We hadn’t realised that the falls were in Switzerland and not in Germany. However we did not have a Swiss Visa. In those days, Switzerland was not part of the Schengen region. The guard at the check-post told us that we would have to go back. However it was impossible to turn the car around on the narrow lane so he spoke to the Swiss guard ahead who allowed us to enter Switzerland, do a U turn a few yards ahead and return to Germany. The German guard on the other side stopped us and asked to see our passports and visa. At this point, our guests informed us that they had left their passports in the lodge. The German guard flatly refused to let them back into the country without proper documents. Finally, after a great deal of pleading and promising to be better organised in future, the guard let our guests join us for the ride back.

Standard Chartered was a bewilderingly chaotic and political organisation. Tony Bond who was head of the card business for Standard Chartered in the Gulf, suddenly resigned leaving the card team headless. Simultaneously, it was felt that somebody senior needed to oversee credit approvals for personal and auto loans in the consumer bank to allow Gautam Vir more elbow room. For several months, I held the titles of ‘Head of Marketing’ , ‘Head of Credit’ and ‘Head of Cards’ for the Consumer Bank. This was a tremendous learning experience. Soon thereafter Samit Ghosh and Gautam Vir left the bank and a team from our Bahrain operations comprising Rupert Keeley (who later joined Visa International) and the late David Martin a grizzled veteran of Standard Chartered took over the running of the Consumer Business in the Gulf. In an abrupt switch of roles, I was put in full charge of the Credit Card business about which I was still learning, while Marketing was left headless and now reported directly to David Martin.

Immediately after taking over the Card business I was saddled with an internal audit of the Card business during which the auditors were hell bent on proving that my card team under Tony, had been negligent with the business. I stoutly defended my team against every accusation made by the auditors and eventually came out of the audit with flying colours.

The Card business is a tricky one to run. As I used to say to my team, we have thousands of opportunities to screw up every day, since each transaction on a card anywhere in the world provides us with one. For example, if a customer was shopping in another country and had inadvertently used up his card limit, he would first blame the card company since the card was not working little realising that it was his own fault. Another problem is to do with card authorisations. Each bank has various rules about the amount they will allow a customer to spend on his card without a verification call. This is done to prevent fraudulent use of stolen cards. For instance, if you have not used your card for a while and the first purchase you make is for a large amount of gold jewellery in another country, chances are that you will get a call from the authorisations department in the bank asking you to verify your identity. All this is done for the protection of customers but customers often do not appreciate this.

The bank had a wealthy businessman as a customer with whom the bank was involved in a variety of corporate transactions. As the Head of Cards, I was asked to grant him a limit of one million US dollars which was the highest we had given anyone. One evening around 7 pm, this gentleman was shopping at an expensive store quite near the bank and because the amount was in excess of the limit set by the bank for purchases in that category, the transaction was interrupted awhile he was asked to verify his identity. Since the man had an ego that was bigger than his ample girth, he stormed out of the store, drove to the bank, marched into John Filmeridis’ office and complained bitterly how he had been humiliated and that the person responsible should be sacked. I had just arrived home which was now fortunately next door to the bank ,when I received a ‘phone call from my Authorisations Manager, Vivek Ramaswamy, who explained what had happened and said that the customer was ranting and raving in John’s office. I told him not to worry , came right back into the building and went to John’s office where I found David Martin along with John and the customer. I explained the bank’s procedures to the customer , told him that what we did was for his own protection and managed to placate him somehow. Up to that point the customer had been baying for Vivek’s blood and I made sure that this did not go any further.

In the Arab world the locals are allowed to have up to four wives. For us this meant that we would issue one ‘primary’ card to the husband and up to four ‘supplementary’ cards to the wives. The problem with this was that these cards shared the same spending limit and if one of the five went a bit overboard the limits were exhausted. We were often found resolving marital disputes when one of the ladies went off on a shopping spree in another country leaving her husband stranded in a restaurant in yet another country since his card had been blocked as his spending limit was exhausted. In these cases, we would allow an emergency extended limit which the customer would be required to settle upon his return.

A large number of our Card customers were expatriates from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Many would spend to the hilt on their cards. By paying the minimum due each month they would incur large interest costs and were unable to pay their bills. Since they could go to jail for this they would run away from the country. My business would lose upto a million US dollars each month due to these ‘ skips’ as they were called.

 Despite this, the Card business grew from strength to strength and I would get letters of congratulations regularly from John and Rupert lauding my team and the excellent business performance.

After a while, both Keeley and Martin left the bank and John brought in a Citi banker called Sherazam Mazari to head the Consumer business. Sherazam was keen to make his mark and had some of his own ideas about how a consumer bank should be organised. He therefore set about dismantling the structure of the consumer bank yet again. One of the outcomes was that he felt there was no need for the Card business to be run as a separate entity but should be merged within the overall Consumer Bank.

 I now had the new title of Head of Strategy for the Consumer Business. As it happened, this role turned out to be quite interesting since the bank was on an acquisition spree and wanted to acquire banks in Lebanon and Egypt. One of my roles was to help evaluate whether these would be wise decisions and to recommend market entry strategies. 

I made my first trip to Beirut in the summer of 1999 to study the Lebanese banking industry. I parked myself in the Hilton hotel in downtown Beirut which had been the scene of several shootouts during the Arab Israeli conflict. The city still looked as if it was at war and several crumbling buildings were dotted around the city pockmarked with bullet holes and broken windows. The late Rafik Hariri the erstwhile Prime Minister of Lebanon had started a real estate company called Solidere which was rebuilding the centre of Beirut and doing a marvellous job of restoring it to its former glory and standing as the ‘Paris of the Middle East’. During a two week visit, I met several bankers, financial journalists, academics, car dealers, government officials, and potential customers of the bank with a view to understanding the nuances of the market.

Upon my return to Dubai, I wrote a detailed report on my findings with recommendations for a strategy to enter the market for retail banking and with forecasts of the likely share of the market that we could hope to acquire. The bank then made a bid to acquire the Metropolitan Bank in Lebanon which was a small bank with six well located branches in and around Beirut. 

A few weeks later a team of people from different parts of the bank was assembled and set off again for Beirut to conduct a ‘due diligence’ of the bank’s operations and books. I led the team for the Consumer bank. This was a laborious process involving a detailed examination of all their processes and accounts to confirm that the bank was not acquiring a dud with unnecessary liabilities. We spent a couple of weeks in Beirut after which we returned to Dubai satisfied that the bank would be a worthwhile acquisition though it would require considerable investments to be made in premises, systems and people. On our last day in Beirut , we were invited to the hilltop home of Mr Baklini the owner of the Metropolitan bank for a grand dinner to celebrate the successful end of our visit. A few weeks later Standard Chartered announced the acquisition of the bank in Beirut.

I was asked whether I would like to move to Beirut as the Head of the Consumer Business for the new bank. I declined the offer since while Beirut was an interesting place to visit for a short stay, I could not see myself living there on a long term basis.

 Soon after this we were required to move to Egypt to conduct a similar due diligence of another bank in Cairo. This time, I did not have the luxury of spending a couple of weeks ahead of the due diligence to study the market and familiarise myself with the market situation, so the task was more difficult. While we were holed up in Cairo, I had Karti visit me over a long weekend and we took in the sights of Cairo by visiting the Cairo Museum and the Pyramids. Karti spent two whole days in the magnificent Museum while I was at work and clams that she did not see all of it.

While I was in Cairo, I received a call from our Human Resources department in Dubai who asked me whether I would like to move to the bank in Bombay as Head of Products for Consumer Banking which included the entire range of consumer banking products including credit cards. This was effectively the role of a Marketing Director with responsibility for profitability of the Consumer business. Standard Chartered had a large business in India and were about to merge with ANZ Grindlays bank in India and would soon become an even bigger bank. This seemed like a good career move although we would have to leave Dubai which we had become quite fond of. By April 2000 I moved to the Standard Chartered guest house flat in Colaba in South Bombay as I gradually eased myself into my new role. Karti stayed on in Dubai for a few months to wind down our establishment there and to organise her own move back to India with her employer. She was still working for Capital Intelligence as a Senior Bank Analyst

The offices of the Consumer bank were located in the dilapidated Phoenix Mills area of Mumbai and were rather dark and dingy and a big disappointment compared to the modern office buildings in Dubai. My team was large and comprised a number of Product Managers who managed different products such as Auto Loans, Personal Loans, Credit Cards, Investment Services, Liabilities and so on . The team was distributed across Mumbai and Bangalore and I would shuttle between these two cities to keep an eye on my flock. One of the members of my team was the famous writer Amish Tripathi who had not yet revealed his talent for writing.

Being a large and complex business, I had over a hundred e mails to attend to each day and by the time I got through them it was past lunch time. In order to keep fit, I joined a tennis club across the road from my flat whose members were chiefly septuagenarian Parsi gentlemen who would fling the choicest abuses at each other in Hindi or Gujarati during their game of doubles and follow it up with a round of hot tea and toast for all present. I managed to get a game in every morning before work. However, I was soon reminded why I had left Bombay in the late seventies for Delhi. The city was dirtier than ever, the traffic was horrendous and the humid climate was worse. Outside work I had few friends in the city and the days were long and dreary. Karti was still in Dubai and planning to wind down our establishment there and move to Bombay in a few weeks.

I began the hunt for suitable accommodation having been given what I thought was a fairly generous rent allowance of Rs 100,000 per month, by the bank. However, after a couple of weeks of trotting around town with various estate agents, I realised that due to the dilapidated condition of most buildings in the city, it would be hard to find decent accommodation that I could afford and also accommodate all the furniture and other stuff that we had acquired in Dubai.

 The integration process with Grindlays had begun and we were frequently in meetings with the consultants from the Boston Consulting Group who were advising us on the merger of the two teams. I was amused to find that we were being lectured to about ‘best practices’ and other such management speak by a young pup of a consultant who appeared to be barely out of his teens. I did not relish the idea of going through a difficult integration process. Mergers of organisations brings out the worst in corporate executives since both sides are insecure about their futures. The atmosphere is usually tense and rather than worrying about winning in the marketplace most people’s attentions are focused inwards.

 As luck would have it I happened to meet my old boss, Titoo Ahluwalia, who was now Chairman of ORG-MARG, the country’s largest market research company. After having been a banker for ten years, that meeting led to a decision that brought me back to my old profession – that of a market researcher.