Chanda Kochhar-Leading Digitization at ICICI Bank

After 2010, the digitization of banking services became more a norm than an option in the Indian context. The government’s Digital India campaign gave a further impetus to banks to implement digitization across banking functions. ICICI under the leadership of Kochhar devised an aggressive strategy to digitize all possible services that encompassed its retail, wholesale, banking, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and treasury businesses. The digitizing was primarily driven by innovations and collaborations. ICICI pioneered various path-breaking tools and services that minimized human intervention and maximized security, convenience, and swiftness. ICICI harnessed its tie-ups with technology majors like IBM and social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to offer the maximum possible impact on digitizing the banking functions. Kochhar realized early on that India’s youth swore by the trinity of digital, social, and mobile. She also believed that most of the youth conducted or were inclined to conduct their banking transactions through these three media of digital, social, and mobile. Thus, she felt that ICICI, in order to retain the first-mover advantage, had to roll out major digital initiatives around these three components...