Difficult for banking sector to attract talent: Uday Kotak

Finance industry veteran Uday Kotak has said it is getting difficult for the banking sector to attract talent, especially with competition from the technology sector. The managing director and chief executive of the private sector lender, Kotak Mahindra Bank, said policymakers and practitioners needed to work together to address this issue.

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“It’s getting more and more difficult because of the kind of opportunities that are available for the new age professionals, particularly on the technology side, and banking is also getting much more sort of built around technology,” Uday Kotak said, speaking at the launch of journalist Tamal Bandyopadhyay’s book, Roller Coaster, here.

Stating that the issue was not just limited to India, Kotak said the best of talent is “getting cautious” about banks.

Time for banking to reimagine its own future: Kotak

“It’s time for the banking sector to really think about transformation, reimagining its own future, changing a lot while keeping some things constant,” he said.

Kotak said that the world and India needed to watch out for inflation getting more sticky, a prolonged war between Russia and Ukraine, and also an assertive China in the new year.

Speaking at the same event, Axis Bank’s Amitabh Chaudhry said it was unlikely for the Reserve Bank of India to take its focus off its core objective of inflation in the new year, despite it being an election year where the government’s focus was likely to shift to helping growth.

‘RBI was always suspicious about Yes Bank’s performance’

Reserve Bank’s former executive director, Sudarshan Sen, said the central bank had always been suspicious about Yes Bank’s performance, and had been interested in knowing how the bank’s erstwhile chief, Rana Kapoor, managed to put up good numbers.

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The RBI was able to come to a conclusion after it followed the money’s trail and how certain non-bank lenders were helping the bank post better numbers, Sen said, adding that it had learned a lot of lessons from that episode and accordingly increased the regulation on NBFCs.

Kotak said banking was a business run on contradictions – where it was highly leveraged itself and at the same time also commanded public trust. “The role of a banker in the institutional framework is very different than any other kind of institution, and along with that comes huge responsibility,” Kotak said.

(With agency inputs)