 Good afternoon. Welcome to an exchange from India talk with leaders of the industry, captains of the industry, people who run large organizations, have a huge impact. Today on this show we have Ms. Zareen Daruwala who is the CEO of Standard Chartered Banking Group in India. Welcome Ms. Daruwala to this conversation and thank you for making time. How have you been doing? What's keeping you busy in COVID times? Tell us how has been the journey in the last 55 days as an individual, as a leader and for the organization that you lead to at the end? So actually I have really not stepped out of home literally out of my complex in the last 55 days but it's been a revelation for me personally. I never thought as a bank we could operate with 90% plus people working from home and given the fact that banks are really tech savvy, it has really enabled us to ensure that most of our employees have laptops at home and they are unable to work. We have obviously over time taken a lot of calls locally as to how we'll you know service customers for example customers also are not sometimes able to send emails from their official IDs. They are sending requests for transactions for personal IDs so we reinvented our processes to ensure that customers really all the transactions are something that we can seamlessly fulfill. In fact the lockdown happened on 25th March and you know with year end for customers salary payments the period between March 25th and March 31st was really something that high volume of transactions and sudden change of how we were operating. But as a bank given the fact that we knew our colleagues in China and Hong Kong and Singapore had started and even Philippines have started the quarantine process so we had a bit of heads up so we had actually started moving to maybe 50% work from home before the entire lockdown and to that extent there was a bit of preparedness there was a bit of planning so we had the benefit of that. You had a head start on that. You know you talked about how you had become more tech enabled you would always work but the digital engagement with customers has increased enhanced. Tell us how has the relationship with your banking customers changed if it all it has changed and if it all is changed for the better. So give us some insights into how do you see the new banking relationship with the customer with almost zero people coming into the bank branch you invested in a huge branch system ATM system but it's all become you know digitally enabled so tell us how the relationship of a banker and a bank changing with the customers. So clearly the last few last two three months has ensured that we were fairly well penetrated digitally we have about 70% of our customers who are digitally active but on the corporate side we've actually reached 99% plus and last few weeks has in fact accelerated because customers had no choice but to use that digital internet banking and use all the digital infrastructure that the bank operates. Also we've ensured that a lot of the service requests we are able to fulfill digitally through a self-service mode the customer really doesn't need to call the call center and I think the technology one thing that was in fact something that we enabled very quickly after the lockdown was the call center the employees could take calls sitting at their home and even do the recording which is required statutorily. So that was something to my mind that was really technologically quite difficult but our teams did it very quickly within a day or two of the lockdown. So we were able to service our customers having said that clearly customer volumes on call center was something that was far higher while branch footfall obviously came down to a trickle. A lot of the traffic were diverted to the call center to that extent for first one week it took a while to adjust but now we are servicing customers last seven weeks sitting at home. So how do you see banking is a little bit about empathy also so how do you bring empathy in digital transactions you know in that change relationship. So the empathy comes in only for customer actually has face to face contact but I think what banks are doing and this is not right now but last few months or one year is something that banks are working on which is hyper personalization using AI and machine learning. So through hyper personalization if a customer is used to sort of shopping from particular store and he's near that store a message will go oh we have this offer cards credit cards and would you like to take it. So that hyper personalization which Amazon does beautifully we see in China Alibaba Alipay do it. I think in banking increasingly it will work on hyper personalization because you really can't have too much of physical contact with the customer till this COVID dies down. So that is where I think the customer sensitivity not bombarding a customer with unwanted messages and unwanted messages but sending something which we believe as a customer the customer wants. Fantastic I think you give fantastic examples of how a bank is dealing with this new paradigm and utilizing technology to serve the needs of the customer. I also want to ask you have you been watching news you know the news viewership has grown by this session is presented by ABP news the news viewership has grown up from 100% to 200% in some cases 250% 300% and across languages English in the and the Indian languages. So what's your view on news channels and have you been watching a lot of news channels. Not a lot I prefer I'm still the traditional print media persons I read my newspapers a lot on the e-newspapers but yeah I think given the fact that people you know are the only way of committing sort of absorbing news is through you know news channel because that's the most much more authentic than social media kind of news so I would like to believe that in this period people would and there's a bit of anxiety level there's a bit of you know what next kind of thing so people would be watching much more of the news and the fact that some people do have time not all not not everybody has time because people are double hunting domestic work and the official work right now fantastic you know you're you're in the thick of the economy banking and financial services are the backbone of any economy yesterday the finance minister and day before yesterday the prime minister announced this relief package and we know that there's been a negative impact in the last 60 days on the Indian economy and the global economy what are your comments on the economy and this package from the finance minister so I'll start with the economy I think we've seen quite a bit of sharp drop in fact our internal house view is the GDP will be minus two percent for this year we saw March interestingly March despite the lockdown was actually last seven days but March itself the IEP has dropped quite substantially and April to June GDP will go down by 22% that's a number if you look at our nominal GDP of 203 lakh crores 22% drop will be close to 10 lakh crores in the April to June quarter itself so that's a massive thing the second thing is the red zones account for 52% of the GDP that clearly is hurting the industrial production and the services sector and if you look at our lockdown India I had seen an article of Economist where India is almost to take one to 100 on the stringent stringency of the lockdown India is 100 on a scale of 1 to 100 so it was the most severe lockdown that was there and if we look at the PMI readings March was 49.3 April was 5.4 so clearly we really need to look at how we can now kickstart the economy very quickly of course the silver lining was that the oil prices came down and every one dollar of oil reduction per barrel is about one and a half billion dollar of GDP save of fiscal deficit reduction so to that extent I think India has been a little bit cushioned about one percent of the GDP will get saved through because India imports a lot of oil and 1.4 billion barrels so we will get about you know if we look at even 25 dollars save we have at least 30 billion dollar kind of savings due to oil imports fantastic and you know as you rightly said and as the finance minister and the prime minister the MSMEs are really the backbone and Standard Chartered Bank has been a you know apart from being a large lender and consumer banking MSMEs also form a part of your portfolio tell us how are you reimagining lending to MSMEs so what we took a view internally is that the traditional method of bank assessment of working capital will not work because there will be no drawing power or very little drawing power so what we decided is we looked at a cash flow based approach for assessing what is the cash flow shortfall and to that extent we support our clients yesterday's announcement is really really good because it achieves so many things because it doesn't put a huge fiscal load on the government in this year but it ensures that the flow of credit to MSMEs sort of gets accelerated so if you look at the proposal of three lakh crores there's a one year moratorium so thankfully you know the government's fiscal for this year will not get strained and also one doesn't expect that you know the entire three lakh crore is going to go wrong or bad so to that extent the government has achieved many purposes through this measure and I think that will really help because MSMEs contribute to about 30% of the GDP and 50% of exports 12 crore people associated with MSMEs so it has a very high impact on the economy the other good measure I feel was the 20,000 crore subordinate debt so even if MSME is struggling actually it's a very good thing to support because rather than make them NPAs it's good to step in and support them in this period also equity flow that has been announced the fund that also gives because for banks you know you can't give you need a certain debt equity ratio and that fund also will ensure that the MSMEs get the equity that is needed so I think very good measures for MSME sector fantastic thank you for being optimistic because optimism will trade that leaders have while they're realistic about what's happening most leaders believe that future will be better than today as a leader you're the CEO of this large organization what is your leadership style and what do you tell yourself so that you can keep yourself calm and prepared for what's happening so my leadership style is very decisive so I take decisions and other thing is I actually I do a bit of planning like I had mentioned earlier you know we were anticipating this kind of lockdown not as we saw it but we were definitely expecting a lockdown kind of situation and we planned for it so I think as leaders one you need to be able to plan obviously you don't get it right 100% but at least if you get it right to a large extent you build scenarios ABC and clearly that helps in times like this the second is the decision I take quick decisions and the third is I have a can do attitude so for me everything can be done there's nothing that is impossible and that's the spirit with which I sort of operate fantastic you know when Zareen talks to all the colleagues what do you tell them what's your favorite line or you know some of the mantras that you give them to be able to transfer your leadership to them to be able to give them positivity there's a lot of people are frustrated that anxious this is literally the hookah world it's volatile it's uncertain it's complex and it's ambiguous what do you tell your colleagues to be able to equip them to deal with what's happening now or in the future better so in the lockdown period I did a big call with all my employees and one of the things I focused on was how well the bank performed in jan to march beautiful focus on the positives yeah and there was no reason for us not to continue the good momentum albertia april and may might be a little subdued but the good momentum should not sort of sort of the present thing should not wipe out the good work that was done taken issue is about you know how do you how do you quickly move to resolve us if you feel that plants are going to be stressed you bucket them into plants who are genuine who need a bit of helping hand and then clients who you feel you know are much more deep rooted problem and then you have different solutions for different sets of plants so this is something that we really focused on and we have a plan as to how we are going to handle different sets of plants depending on the industry that they belong to and depending on how severe the corona virus impact will be okay beautiful you know we are getting you know one of the beauty about this digital transformation and the digital enablement that we become part of our life we are talking through webinar you're in your home i'm in my home my colleagues who are enabling that in their home the audiences are in their home is the questions the interactivity so i want to bring viewers here uh so what there is tanvi daswani asking what will the banks be doing on physical retail branches in all corporate offices for the next 12 months what will you do they're underutilized some of the gauche is asking if consumers haven't enough money to buy products or cash flows you know they don't have enough money how will the msme return the loan so you're giving the loans but the businesses are not still getting demand what do you have to say about that and then more questions yeah so for the first question anyway i think we'll leave the branches and the offices because of physical distance norms will ensure that you know uh 50 percent max 50 percent colleagues can come to office till the virus dies down because we need to have that minimum few meters distance so we will need all the physical premises for sure and even in the branches customers need between two customers you need to be so we will all the infrastructure for we don't see ourselves doing anything differently for the next one year in terms of how many employees should be working from home and how many from office i think it's a function of criticality of the role and also the personal side if our employees have some you know old elderly parents or small children then we look at that as you know people who will work for home for some time and the remaining coming to office so i think the physical infrastructure is your two-stage in terms of the msme the buying part i i think clearly uh the challenge for the government will be how to revive demand because even as you address the production side issues the challenge will be how do you revive demand because of your job insecurity because of what people have seen there's a bit of conservatism which has come and i mean the kind of savings we are seeing in the banking system is huge because customers flight to safety is already happening and we're seeing that huge redemption pressure and good banks you know our strong banks are getting a lot of low deposits and we've been obviously a big beneficiary of that also so on the demand side you know there are a few things that i've seen other countries do for example germany post financial crisis actually had a scrappage policy to revive the auto industry which is a big industry in germany and even in india auto industries fairly significant both from a financing side and also from a job creation side because manufacturing leads to big number of jobs so in germany what they did was by rick are the german government gave 2500 euro uh uh benefit to the customer and in one year the auto demand jumped by 40 percent now those are the kind of interventions that will be needed for example recently we've seen Korea for example i set up a 33 billion dollar fund to support industries which they think have got very badly impacted like you know shipyards and airlines and you know the it's the usual sectors which are tourism related etc now different governments are doing different things to sort of support certain sectors and you know even if even if you have like a four month window saying that i'm going to reduce the gst for three months or four months and you know it's a special period you can just quickly it starts some of that purchasing happening similarly in real estate you we don't see people right now wanting to buy any real estate so the government can bring down the stamp duty for a finite period and and reduce the ready reckoner rates that can spur the home home budget so you will need to also do sharp interventions on the demand side to spur demand because indian consumers are very value seeking consumer and moment you they see value even if it's for four five months they will rush in in that period and after that you know the momentum continues is what they've seen beautiful i think we get you know we've got 10 questions so the reason i'm looking at my screen is i'm looking at the questions and you know questions are a good indicator of the people are very engaged in them so thank you for being specific and giving suggestions that are implementable so i want to compliment you on for doing that and you know there's some questions that we would can take them now what is the biggest lesson that the banking sector has learned from covid 19 and what do you feel should be the action should be that should be implemented prachi chandiram ramani are the bankers trained to protect themselves from the covid 19 as they will be dealing with huge crowds as part of money dispensation in the near future a gv narayan you feel self-reliance by local will affect your business post covid because you're a stand chart i think that dr parag amin small businesses were worst hit as they do not even have enough results to take care of their fixed cost like rent salaries banks who are not very forthcoming in terms of helping them what is your comment on this than we've done swani would you be renegotiating rents on your physical branches and then more questions read you know so you're a standard chartered bank though you must tell yours how long you've been in india i know that you're pretty much an indian bank you know you've been here why don't you take them through the journey of stand chart just to refresh the history of the stand chart in india the stand chart has been in india for 160 years that's right i want to tell to all the viewers 160 years because in my first job i in 96 i used to be with stand chart and i did learn that it was there for so many years so it was it was mind-boggling to know that so it's it's been around for 160 years in india i want to emphasize to the person who asked the question yeah so dr parag amin's question banks are not forthcoming in helping them i think yesterday's announcement by the fm clearly will ensure that small businesses certainly get credit and three lakh crores is a very large number because this is over and about this is the incremental need that will be catered i think there was a bit of nervousness amongst banks because of the uncertainty of the period of lockdown as also you know if there are some banks who have their fair share of npa's and they were worried about lending further and having much more npa's so i think yesterday's measured to my mind addresses at least the msme sectors i'm sure phase two will address certain other industries which have been badly affected the other question mr naran do you feel self reliance will affect your business post-covid no i don't think so we are a very strong local bank of course we do a lot of cross-border trade but i don't think that will affect our business we have i would say about 80 90 percent of our revenues just from local local business and a little bit from cross-border business how do you review the economic package announced yesterday by fm i would say for the msme sector it's really good clearly the kind of you know banking flow that will go to the sector will my view re-invigorate the sector and given the kind of employment that the sector caters to it's a very very needed package we've seen a lot of other countries also support sms for example singapore government has given a nine-month moratorium on and a lot of indonesia many countries have supported sms in a big way given the employment that they give uh are the bankers trained to protect themselves from the COVID-19 as they'll be dealing with huge crowds uh actually uh interestingly the footfall is quite low and people are quite scared so you know the people will try and avoid coming to branches as much as possible than use digital channels upi for example is something that loads of clients are using uh in march upi had 52 uh crores of uh transactions so you know that's the kind of volume upi is having so we are seeing clients increasingly use as much digital so and then they'll use the atms clearly there is a protocol that banks are already following inside the branches we do temperature check when a customer walks into a branch we keep sanitizers we have the screens so that our employees are not directly exposed to the customer so they make precautions banks are already taking biggest lesson banking sector has learned from COVID i think the biggest lesson we've learned is that we can run the bank with 90 percent city at home which to be two months back if somebody had said i would have been very not very sure i would say but today i can be very sure that we can deliver to customers almost similar levels of services with uh so many people sitting at home yeah so you know one of the things is i tell myself never say never have an open mind we don't even know what we don't know you know i would say the same i would be very skeptical who said to me that all the media operations can run from home i i'd say it's not possible but time has shown us that it is possible uh so if i may ask a question that's not there in some of it answer all the questions you know it kind of see i'll cover on monday that hits is a 3c economy caring collaborative and contactless uh tell us how do you reimagine your bank in a caring collaborative and contactless economy so uh contactless is something that anyway banks are quite used to pick is a lot of customers and the volume of transactions are actually happening um uh contactless i think caring is uh about what the bank has done in the last few weeks for example old people our people have actually gone and delivered cash to their house uh where couples could not come out or uh old people in fact to the extent that some of them have even helped them with their grocery and things like that so i think that little personal touch for people who are not as privileged in terms of their ability their handicap or whatever i think that is where um the bank clearly uh has been really nice emails that i'm getting from customers normally you have a lot of customer complaints but off late i'm getting a lot of thank you emails so that shows that the bank has become really more caring in the new this thing the third c sorry you mentioned was what uh collaborative caring caring collaborative contactless so collaborative i think to my mind the bank has to be collaborative with the customer we can have empathy for what the customer is going through the business problems and give a solution and have a solution approach uh to a customer fantastic so you are so some of the ideas that you may have implemented in this lockdown may have come from suggestions from the customers you know could have or it could come if you know in terms of how the processes work uh there are more questions i want to bring in a senior editor that we have mr ruel i mean and ruel wants to ask a question and we have ruel on the screen ruel wants to know is how will the marketing spends off standard chartered bank uh change post uh go with or already have they changed so how you know it's a big brand but staying top of mind you know investing in getting new banking customers so tell us a little bit about the marketing miss mix how it is changing and what will change and what will stay so i think uh clearly the marketing spends will increase on digital marketing because face to face contact with customer will be minimum for the next one year or till the covid dies down so uh the whole marketing spends will be much more digital uh and less uh on the you know the tv and that kind of uh spends for a bank for a bank like us which is uh because the good thing about digital marketing is after that the fulfillment is also end-to-end digital so for the customer the journey is seamless from the time he shows an interest suppose in a credit card or a personal loan the whole fulfillment can be end-to-end digital for the customer so one of the things is that not in your you know stand chart as you said the numbers are very healthy but you know and i'm not asking about any so the the the nps and banks have grown right by in-laws of course there are exceptions and with covid coming in will there be job losses in the banking sector in the financial services sector do you see a knock where where banks will kind of shrink in the number of people they work with at least i do think so right now i don't see that happening unless it becomes really dismal even one or two years later because the thing is that as as what we've done in our bank for example is as we've gone digital we've actually retrained certain job families and re-skilled them and deployed them elsewhere and to me leaders the banking leaders actually have to focus on re-skilling employees because every time you introduce some technology the whole the way you do the processes your everything has to change and leadership you know involves like ensuring that the employees are continuously upgraded and the skills are upgraded and in fact we're using this lockdown period to ensure our clients sorry our employees do e-learning and they do a lot of sort of self-skilling and use this period very judiciously right fantastic there are more questions and let me take audience questions rather than putting my question you know somebody asked would you be negotiating rents on physical premises okay if you had to make a prediction for the future what would that be i think it's very hard to make a prediction i'm not i don't think i'm equipped to make prediction but the way i have planned is that nine or 12 months daily covid is here to stay and given that scenario how should we be planning our bank and our employees and our operations so that is the way i'm looking at internally but hard to say how you know it's quite possible that even if the vaccine is found by the time you you get the whole immunity for most of majority of the people it's going to be maybe another one year so you know it's quite possible that this whole period can be extended so i think one has to to my mind prepare for the worst in terms of this being an extended period and how do we plan our lives accordingly that's the way we are thinking now also you know the Rohail Amin is again asking he is our editor on experiential marketing he says banks and do a lot of events and activations for customer engagement how are you planning the reach out in a socially distanced world so we have been using webinars already in this lockdown period so for example for our wealth customers we are ranging our webinars by calling experts and the attendance is really good and i think this is how we'll have to for some time keep on and obviously emails but more than emails we found the response to we've done about five webinars in the last few weeks for our customers and there's been great response and that is how i think we'll be doing it for the next few months to avoid as much physical contact with customers i think Rohail you have your answer i want to ask my two last questions i know the conversation is still quarter past one and if there are more questions we already have had 19 questions and we try to compress them one question is you know a lot of leaders that have talked over the last four weeks they say that covid is not necessarily a black swan event it's a gray rhino event a gray rhino appears more often than a black swan so tell us has the behavior change that you see in your opinion has become permanent or we will go back to our old ways so what is reversible and what is irreversible and how does it impact banking and how does it impact brand building so i think what is irreversible is the whole digital behavior once customers become digitally savvy we've not seen them go back to their physical ways so to my mind that is an irreversible thing what will reverse is definitely customers going back to malls and cinema halls and doing leisure travel that that will come back for sure post the virus having died down but certain you believe that i was talking to investor we had a bw disrupt which is our startup we had Rohit bian of lumis partner he said i won't invest in travel i won't invest in restaurants i won't invest in hospitality as a sector i will invest in health care at home i'll invest in elderly care i'll invest in placing companies so that that is for the next one or two years do we see that not coming back at all i don't think so i think it will come back maybe one and a half years later or whatever but it will come back but what we've seen is you know the digital behavior of customers once you're used to buying things online and once you're used to doing your net banking at home or from the convenience of your mobile on the move you don't change that very often that's that's been our one experience so some behaviors will be irreversible if you look at ali baba actually ali baba tried post crisis the whole eco online e-commerce in china actually when crisis comes has been certain behaviors change definitely so what you're clearly saying that in the short term some of the behavior like more digital discovery engagement digital fulfillment will become a way of life but possibly it'll be a hybrid model my last question is over the last six weeks eight weeks we've seen some of the industries become zero revenue we talked about which one you know which one what do you have to say to entrepreneurs why do you maybe the CEO of a large bank very entrepreneurial if you're a CEO very entrepreneurial what do you have to say to entrepreneurs whose businesses have been brought to ground you know they are not getting any revenues how do they reimagine themselves how do they go into the future actually I think it's very industrious specific how they have to reinvent themselves so I was interestingly talking to the CEO of a cinema chain multiplexers chain and I was quite impressed with the way you know they have thought through that post opening how are they going to do things differently in terms of how will how will you know the movie or sit for how will you know things happen how will you have minimal physical touch with its security checking so I think promoters have to reinvent their whole thinking to make the customer feel that even if they go for a movie or whatever they wherever they go they are not likely to contract the virus I think that mindset shift if the promoter is able to do then there's hope of kind of getting the business momentum obviously not to the same level as pre-covid but at least to a large extent to survive thank you so much for being real you know one of the things I liked about your conversation you've been specific and real and of course optimistic about the future I want to end by we still have four minutes I want to end by asking who are people you look up to how does Zareen get her inspiration you know how do you keep yourself centered who are the people you look up to how do you fill yourself with the right tools whether it's emotional tool it's knowledge tool the technology tool in this really very changing world full of flux very dynamic you know you want to learn something new on the go I was not familiar with doon call I think it's a way of life like what's happening for me you know as easy as to tell us what who are the people Zareen Darwala looks up to and why and how does she keep herself going how does she reinvent herself so I have over the last few years really I find I learn a lot from my customers and when I say customers it's not only retail it's a lot of corporate clients and the CEOs and I make it a point to stay engaged because I find it very refreshing even in this period every day I speak to two three clients just to understand how are things on the ground what are they doing differently and sometimes how some of the clients are handling you know the tough decisions also helps me think through or sort of gives me a lot of insights as to how others are dealing with the situation and how I should be dealing with the situation the second thing is I have a simple attitude if I don't understand something I just tell somebody in my office please explain me I don't understand it I have no problems telling I don't understand to anybody and I think that ensures that one you are not too full on yourself or you think you know it all do you think you know it all is the day of your downside because you know you can't know it and the sooner you acknowledge you don't know it and you you try and listen to bright minds domain experts specialists domain experts you learn a lot so that's how I need my my own self and what is your favorite line something that you repeat yourself how you tell your colleagues like I tell everyone that you know storms don't last dreams don't perish I keep telling everyone your life is about trade-offs either you can you know eat more or you can be healthy you know either you can be meticulous or you can be not successful in what you want so what doesn't that Zareen says to herself and to her colleagues you know what's her favorite line or you know never say die attitude never say die so on this note we'd like to keep our time we're in the business of time every minute every second cost so thank you Zareen Darwala for being so positive real and authentic on this conversation we wish Standard Chartered Bank luck we make wish stand chart customers luck and standard chart is pretty much in you know Indian institution 160 years in India so we look forward to collaborating with Standard Chartered Bank and in some way enhancing what Standard Chartered does thank you for joining the exchange for media pitch talk and we look forward to another conversation another time thank you God bless you have a good day