EXECUTIVE PROFILE*

Chanda D. Kochhar     

Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director, Head of International Banking Arm, Executive Director of Retail
Banking Business, Executive Director, Chairman of Committee of Directors, Member of Fraud Monitoring
Committee, Member of Asset-Liability Management Committee, Member of Credit Committee Member of
54
Asset-Liability Management Committee,, Member of Customer Service Committee, Member of Risk Committee
54
and Director of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company Limited, ICICI Bank Ltd.

Age Total Annual Compensation This person is connected to 54 board members in 7 different organizations across
8 different industries.
48 12,143,250 INR
As of Fiscal Year 2010 See Board Relationships

BACKGROUND*
Ms. Chanda D. Kochhar is a Director of ICICI Prudential Asset Management Company Limited. She is the Managing Director and
Chief Executive Officer of ICICI Bank Limited. Ms. Kochhar began her career with ICICI as a Management Trainee in 1984, and has
thereon successfully risen through the ranks by handling multidimensional assignments and heading all the major functions in the
Bank at various points in time. She has been Head of International Banking arm of ICICI Bank ...
Read Full Background

CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS*
ICICI Bank Towers
Mumbai, Maharashtra 400051

India

Phone: 91 22 2653 6157

Fax: 91 22 2653 1175

BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEMBERSHIPS*

Senior General Manager and Director
ICICI Personal Financial Services Limited
Director
ICICI Prudential Asset Management Company Limited
Former Chairperson
ICICI Home Finance Company Limited
2001-Present
Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director, Head of International Banking Arm, Executive Director of Retail Banking
Business, Executive Director, Chairman of Committee of Directors, Member of Fraud Monitoring Committee, Member of
Asset-Liability Management Committee, Member of Credit Committee, Member of Customer Service Committee, Member
of Risk Committee and Director of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company Limited
ICICI Bank Ltd.
2001-2009
Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director, Head of International Banking Arm, Executive Director of Retail Banking
Business, Executive Director, Chairman of Committee of Directors, Member of Fraud Monitoring Committee, Member of
Asset-Liability Management Committee, Member of Credit Committee, Member of Customer Service Committee, Member
of Risk Committee and Director of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company Limited
ICICI Bank Ltd.
2006-Present
Chairman, Member of Board Investment Committee, Joint Managing Director of ICICI Bank Limited and Head of
International Banking - ICICI Bank Arm
ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company Ltd.
2007-Present
Chairperson, Chief Executive Officer of ICICI Bank Limited and Managing Director of ICICI Bank Limited
ICICI Bank UK PLC
2007-2009
Chairperson, Chief Executive Officer of ICICI Bank Limited and Managing Director of ICICI Bank Limited
ICICI Bank UK PLC
2008-2009
Former Independent Director
Oil and Natural Gas Corp. Ltd.
2008-Present
Chairman of the Board
ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company Limited
2009-Present
Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer of ICICI Bank Limited and Managing Director of ICICI Bank Limited
ICICI Bank Canada Ltd.
2009-2009
Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer of ICICI Bank Limited and Managing Director of ICICI Bank Limited
ICICI Bank Canada Ltd.
2009-Present
Chairperson, Chief Executive Officer of ICICI Bank and Managing Director of ICICI Bank
Icici Securities Limited

EDUCATION*
Bachelor's Degree
Institute of Cost and Works Accountants of India
Master's Degree
Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies

Chanda Kochhar was born in November 17, 1961 in Jodhpur, Rajasthan. She completed her
Bachelor of Arts degree from Jai Hind College, Mumbai. Later, she joined the Jamnalal Bajaj
Institute of Management Studies for the Masters Degree in Management Studies. She has two
children, a son and a daughter.

She is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Managing Director (MD) of the bank in May
2009. She is currently the Joint Managing Director (JMD) of ICICI Bank. She is also the bank`s
the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and the official spokesperson & that`s not all. She also heads
the Corporate Centre of ICICI Bank.

Chanda Kochhar joined ICICI as a Management trainee after her Masters in the year 1984.
After 9 years of hard work, Kocchar was appointed as part of core team to set the ICICI bank.
She got promotion in 1994 & 1996 as Assistant General Manager and then Deputy General
Manager respectively. In 1998, she was promoted as the General Manager with role of handling
relationships with ICICI`s top 200 clients. In April 2001, she was promoted as Executive
Director, heading the retail business in ICICI Bank. In April 2006, Chanda Kocchar was
appointed as Deputy Managing Director of ICICI Bank.

Honors & Awards

Under Kocchar`s leadership, ICICI Bank won the Best Retail Bank in India award in 2001, 2003,
2004 and 2005 and Excellence in Retail Banking Award� in 2002; both awards was given by
the The Asian Banker. Kocchar personally was awarded Retail Banker of the Year 2004 (Asia-
Pacific region) by the Asian Banker, Business Woman of the Year 2005 by The Economic Times
and Rising Star Award for Global Awards 2006 by Retail Banker International. Kocchar has also
consistently figured in Fortune`s list of Most Powerful Women in Business since 2005. She
climbed up the list debuting with the 47th position in 2005, moving up 10 spots to 37 in 2006
and then to 33 in 2007. In the 2008 list, Kocchar features at the 25th spot.
Chief executive, ICICI Bank
India

AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade

Created a stir when she was named in December to be the first

woman boss of ICICI Bank, India's second largest bank and, until lately,
its fastest-growing. After taking charge in May, she now oversees a
bank with assets of $100 billion. After topping her B-school class, she
joined ICICI 25 years ago as a management trainee, when it was a
wholesale lending institution. Proved her smarts when she was given
responsibility for bank's fledgling retail business and helped transform
ICICI into a retail banking powerhouse. She wears saris to work, some
of which she designs herself. Married to B-school buddy Deepak, a
wind energy entrepreneur. —Naazneen Karmali

Enter Chanda
Beginning end-January, soon after the board took a call on Chanda Kochhar as Kamath’s successor, she initiated a
detailed review of the various businesses the bank is into. And over the next four months, she started putting a plan
into place to build a new template for ICICI that looked at variables beyond the balance sheet. “I knew I had to help
people understand the other dimensions of growth and the logic behind it,” she says.
Kamath knew his successor was in for a tough haul and would need the time to settle down and gain the confidence
of the team. Which is perhaps why, two months before he stepped down, he made sure he came in a half hour late to
work and left an hour earlier in the evening. And immediately after he stepped down as CEO, he took six weeks off
from the bank to spend time with his daughter and grand children in Seattle. It was his way of providing space to the
new leader.
In any case, he had primed Kochhar for the job well in advance. That nod put Kochhar’s plan to hold operational
expenses at previous year’s levels firmly in the saddle and stoked a chain of events over the next couple of months.
Vaidyanathan was given charge of pruning costs on the retail side of the business. Every Friday evening, about 20
senior managers would brainstorm in his room on how it could be done. The ground rules were clear. Nothing was
sacrosanct. He told them, they could question anything. If they thought his travel schedule, or that of anybody else,
imprudent, it would well be within their rights to raise the flag and call for a review.
Stopping Blame Game
In July last year, Vaidyanathan and Ramkumar addressed senior managers in the retail business. “For the first time,
we stood up and admitted publicly we failed in areas like unsecured credit and rural banking,” says Ramkumar. “We
got punished for setting business goals ahead of capabilities. But as leaders in ICICI Bank, it is okay to stand up and
say we are human, that we don’t lack character. It was done without any embarrassment.”
Both exercises paid off and blunted the edges off a blame game that could have spiralled out of control. If any traces
remained, the crisis stoked by Lehman’s collapse in September buried all differences. “It was the best thing that could
have happened,” says Ramkumar. The team came together under Kochhar. The first thing it did was to start pulling
out of lending. But more recently, after she moved to the corner office in May, a fresh team and a new strategy is
making its presence felt.
Take Sonjoy Chatterjee who heads the corporate and international banking business. Until very recently, corporate
banking relied on fees from large merger and acquisition deals. Inherently though, this is a lumpy business. When the
deal pipeline evaporates, fees follow. To get around the hump, he added a new dimension: Transaction banking. In
other words, for all the major clients ICICI services, it now manages their non-fund based businesses as well such as
forex requirements and opening letters of credit. In the past, it rarely pitched for such businesses. But now, it does
aggressively. Because what it does is provide a layer of predictability to the income stream from corporates. “Using
our clout with large corporate clients, we will actively push for such business now,” says Chatterjee.
In part, this was possible because ICICI has just got the licences to open another 580 branches, over the 1,453 it
already has. Of these, Kochhar has earmarked 20 for special status as mega branches. These will serve corporate
customers as well. In some ways, this is how Axis Bank, State Bank of India and HDFC Bank function.
In the past, ICICI preferred to centralise operations while branches were manned by younger staffers. The outcome
was poor turnaround time. The branch staff had little control over the outcome.
In the new dispensation, a premium is being placed on the branches. Veterans from headquarters are being deployed
to head them. A considerable amount of authority is being vested on them to solve customer issues at the branch
itself. At the same time, the bank is targeting the government sector, and even stock market participants to open
current accounts to improve the CASA ratio.
The new branch licences are also a reason to wind down the direct marketing channel, a move that brings with it
considerable pain. The channel was built over the years with assiduous wooing of partners. But now that the
relationship has to be terminated, there is angst in the system.
“We had to give the better agents sufficient notice, so that they could find alternative employment,” says Ramkumar.
“Where there was friction, we had to tell them firmly we had no obligations.”
The branches are now the pivot for any retail lending. “They are the face of the brand in a geography. So we need to
ensure we get our best people to man them,” says Sandeep Bakshi. As things stand, these branches will take
anywhere between 18-36 months to stabilise.
Her biggest challenge is to meet market expectations. So far, to keep its high growth strategy intact, the bank has
had to raise funds from the markets several times. Yet at 7.8 percent, the return on equity (ROE) has been poor. As a
result, its market value took a beating.
In his interactions with analysts, Kannan, the group CFO, has promised an ROE of 15 percent over the next three
years. That will be tough. Kochhar knows that as well and admits she doesn’t know how the numbers will eventually
add up. But the roadmap, she says, is clear.
Part one of the plan involves pushing through the ambitious branch expansion plan without adding to operating costs.
Which means, in the current fiscal, Kochhar will be focussed on looking at each item of the profit and loss account
and balance sheet; and perhaps restructuring it. She believes she has the time on her hand to do it right now
because credit growth is moderate. When growth kicks in, which Kochhar reckons will be next year, the bank will be
in a better position to capitalize on it. And finally, in the third phase, focus on unlocking value from subsidiaries.
“There is no alternative,” Kochhar says. “In a way, these are huge structural changes. But we have to implement it. I
think the actual results of this will not show for a couple of quarters. But I know from internal reviews we are in the
right direction.”
Kannan says he has built a dashboard for his senior colleagues, which captures the key metrics. Every fortnight, the
performance is reviewed. Any course correction in strategy and tactics are then implemented quickly. “A lot of
building blocks are now in place. I am very confident that people will start seeing the facts a couple of months from
now,” says Kochhar.
By all accounts, it will be a delicate balancing act. ICICI is hard-wired to be aggressive. Keeping that instinct at bay
will take a lot out of her. Already, public sector banks like SBI are getting aggressive in the home loan market. In the
normal course, ICICI would have been right out there, slugging it out for the spoils and enjoying a bloody good fight.
But these aren’t normal times at the bank. For at least three quarters, Kochhar needs to prove to the rest of the world
that the bank can put its house in order, before it can go out there and do what it does best: Fight.