Life has come full circle for Romesh Sobti. As a probationer at State Bank of India (SBI) in the sleepy little town of Bethia in Motihari district of Bihar, he spent a lot of time with rural folk. From one crop a year, farmers were encouraged to grow three and also put up tube wells.
That was 1974. It was a simple and fulfilling existence, recalls Sobti who can never forget the small four-room hotel where he lived and the unpretentious halwai Bharat Jalpan where he had breakfast every morning.
Forty-five years later, Sobti is criss-crossing the countryside trying to convert eight million Bharat Financial customers into consumers. And savers. He already has eight lakh Jan Dhan accounts in the kitty but there’s miles to go. The trick, he says, is to try and keep in touch with every customer much like Amazon, makes sure he knows about every new title in Greek mythology which he reads voraciously. Of course, this is completely different from the consumer banking that he learnt during his 18-year stint as head of ABN Amro.
But like a good cricketer, he never takes his eyes off the ball. It was the regular visits, week after week, to the Escorts factory and follow-up chats with the sales and purchase managers that once led him to discover piles and piles of motorcycles in the yard; a check with the dealers revealed the inventory wasn’t moving. Another time, he peeped into the godowns of Kelvinator only to discover thousands of refrigerators lying unsold.
And he was quick to sense trouble at a major drugs producer and the first to pare the exposure. Today, business correspondents are tracked across villages using Google Maps.
“If they stay longer than 45 minutes, there is a problem in the village. If they spent just 15 minutes, it means they did not hold a meeting of the borrowers,” he explains.
Sobti’s now loaning money to microfinance borrowers for a television set or some household product. “She has borrowed twice and repaid the loans so now I can finance a TV,” he points out.
So, banking may have gone digital but it’s still all about risk. And Sobti says it’s the rigour at SBI that prepared him. “You came out of that probation feeling like a banker. We knew how the back of an LC looked and in our spare time we familiarised ourselves with the signatures so we could spot a fake one,” he recalls.
It was at ANZ Grindlays, where he spent eight years, that he learnt the ropes of relationship banking. In between, he captained the bank’s cricket team. Sobti calls himself a ‘decent cricketer’ and a bit of all-rounder since he started out as a batsman went on to keep wickets and later turned into spin bowler. If he is able to adapt to situations, it’s partly because as an Army officer’s son, he was constantly on the move. Besides, his stint at boarding school left him disciplined. To this day, he polishes his shoes.
And while he believes some stress is probably good because ‘otherwise complacency sets in’, he makes sure there are enough books on his bedside table about his favourite Greek hero Hector, the Trojan prince. Or he watches a movie but he never, never watches the news.
If Sobti has been able to play such a long innings and take IndusInd Bank’s score to where it is — total assets of Rs 2.78 lakh crore and market cap over Rs 1 lakh crore — he clearly doesn’t flash outside the off-stick. He may not have an armory of shots but the few he has are good: he never gives a loan before he has the deposit, he always honours a commitment and he doesn’t try to do it all. Instead, he sells the best products in the market. It may seem simple but you need to play it Sobti’s way, like a straight drive, all along the ground.