Courtesy of Customer World, here is a great interview with Kamath, CEO of ICICI Bank.  It is now India’s 2nd largest bank.

This first quote is fabulous.

Customer World: ICICI Leadership Secrets

So our challenge is to invent a new business model where we can create a distribution base effectively in 600,000 villages in India, and to learn to do that at one-tenth the cost of urban India. Just to put that into a scale that someone could understand, we believe that to succeed in urban India, we need to do be able to do business at one-tenth the cost of the west. The reason is that the ticket size of the banking product in India is one-tenth that in the west. If it is a deposit of $10,000 in the west, it will be $1,000 in urban India and $100 in rural India. Loans operate at a similar scale.

Big banks speak in terms of basis point changes in their cost structure.  Kamath is talking about a 90% change, down to 1/10th of what others do. 

Here is the full interview at Wharton.

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