Every year, FE India’s Best Banks Awards does something quietly important: it holds up a mirror to where Indian finance has been, and offers a glimpse of where it is headed. At its 18th edition — held on a Sunday evening in Mumbai — that reflection was more layered than ever.
The room brought together an unlikely confluence: the custodians of century-old public sector banks and the founders of companies that didn’t exist a decade ago.
Both were being recognised for excellence. That coexistence is itself the story of Indian finance — an industry in the middle of a long, unfinished transformation, where tradition and disruption are no longer opposites but collaborators.
Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal, who presided as chief guest, gave the evening a broader frame. India, he noted, remains well-placed to absorb global economic shocks — buoyed by strong foreign exchange reserves and robust remittance inflows.
It was a reminder that the health of the country’s financial sector is not incidental to India’s economic story; it is load-bearing.
The awards, adjudicated by a jury of formidable pedigree chaired by S Ramadorai, former Vice-Chairman of TCS, and including Bain Capital Chairman Amit Chandra, SBI former Chairman Dinesh Khara, IndAsia Fund Advisors Chairman Pradip Shah and JSW Steel former joint MD & Group CFO Seshagiri Rao recognised 14 categories across banks, NBFCs, small finance banks, and fintechs.
Indian Bank and ICICI Bank took the top honours in the public and private sector banking categories respectively, with SMBC recognised as the best foreign bank. Muthoot Finance led the NBFC field, while AU Small Finance Bank won in its category and IDFC FIRST Bank was singled out for its savings product.
Axis Bank’s Digital Bank of the Year award was perhaps the most telling of the institutional prizes — a signal that in banking, the product is increasingly the interface.
The fintech winners Groww in investment, PhonePe in payments, Moneyview in lending, Perfios in reg-tech, and Go Digit in insurance mapped, almost perfectly, the contours of a new financial system being built in parallel to the old one.
These are not fringe players anymore. Their presence on the same stage as India’s largest banks is a measure of how much ground they have claimed.
The evening’s most resonant moments, though, were reserved for individuals. K Satyanarayana Raju, former MD and CEO of Canara Bank, was named Banker of the Year — a recognition of leadership within one of the country’s most demanding institutional environments.
And Sanjiv Bajaj received the Lifetime Achievement Award: an acknowledgement that in an industry often measured in quarterly numbers, there is a rarer currency — the kind of sustained contribution that outlasts any single cycle.