Farming is Dipak Gupta’s stress-buster. It takes a lot of time and effort, probably raising the cost of producing ‘lauki’ on the plot he owns at Alibaug to Rs 1,000 a kg, but the MD at Kotak Mahindra Bank (KMB) doesn’t mind at all. It gives him something that’s priceless — a lot of joy. Spending more time under the ‘jamun’ and mango trees is number one on his post-retirement bucket list.Also on the list is a research project with the Tata Cancer Hospital in Varanasi, which is where his roots are. As the son of a central banker, Gupta grew up in other parts of the country, but now he wants to set up an old age home there. Gupta is also looking forward to being more actively involved with the Centre of Excellence at IIM Ahmedabad — a full-fledged research unit for data analytics and AI.
This is an initiative sponsored by him and is very close to his heart. He has always been fascinated with technology having done project on AI during his electronics engineering course at Benares Hindu University. Having forgotten all about it for 30 years, he picked it all up again a few years back.At the bank, AI is now used to make credit decisions, analyse patterns from customer information, to nudge them to act and to detect frauds.
“The objective has been to change the technology framework at the bank, the consciousness, the direction, the approach, the skill-sets,” he says. Gupta’s also terribly kicked about using ChatGPT, though he admits he has been left embarrassed on a couple of occasions when some of the information turned out to be incorrect.Although he’s sold on technology and has been running a bank, Gupta doesn’t believe he has it in him to set up a fintech. The two are very different worlds and need different mindsets. Very simply put, for a fintech, every customer’s individual problem is important and must be solved irrespective of how much it costs.
“It’s what we call an n=1 problem,” he says. For a bank, however, customers are a collective group. Domain expertise, Gupta’s convinced, has little value because youngsters can pick it all up in 30 days. “The oldies just don’t get it, they simply don’t have the mindset,” he says.Looking back at the years gone by, Gupta says with a smile how he had absolutely no idea about what bill discounting was all about when he joined the Kotak NBFC, a month before it went public. Neither, he says, did he know the difference between leasing and hire purchase.
“Fortunately, Mr Kotak didn’t either and he didn’t ask me,” he says. But together they mastered the business and luckily for them, the margins used to be crazy, so 0.5% here or there didn’t matter too much. And in the process he became proficient in Gujarati, because “half the counterparties were Gujaratis”. Setting up and running the bank was fun and a great experience, he says, although very complicated because, unlike in other cases, here an NBFC was turning into a bank.
Gupta has been known to be very patient with his colleagues and one who rarely loses his cool. His coping mechanism when he’s angry is to simply count till 10 before saying anything. To stay fit, he follows a thrice-a-week yoga routine and even now can comfortably do a shirsashan. With a couple of months left before he hangs up his boots, Gupta can’t wait to know what the stars foretell. The study of astrology is what he intends to revisit very soon.