India’s appeal as alternative to China rises: Citi’s Khullar

livemint.com:

MUMBAI : In a strategic shift, Citi India sold its retail business to Axis Bank and is now focussed on its institutional business and global capability centres (GCCs). By the end of this year, the bank’s GCCs that go beyond just being a back office to its global operations will employ around 30,000 people. In an interview, Citi India chief executive officer Ashu Khullar emphasized that while India is not the only option to counter the world’s dependence on China, it is a credible option, and the bank is seeing growing interest among clients to invest.

Edited excerpts: One of the significant strategy changes over the past two years, and that was really when Jane Fraser took over as the CEO— it was a global strategy refresh, as we call it—was to try and focus on our institutional businesses. And because we believe that’s where Citi has the best, long-term sustainable advantage because of a global network. And an incidental part of that was exiting our consumer banking businesses in 14 countries globally.

So, that was not an India-specific decision. And as a part of that, we made the sale to Axis Bank, which I think was handled well, from the perspective of minimal disruption to our clients, employees—96% of them accepted offers. Overall, I feel pretty good about what I think the teams did.

As I said, this was part of the whole strategy, and as a part of that, the idea was to redeploy our capital to our institutional businesses. The strategy is obviously that we want to bring foreign clients to India, and we want to take Indian clients overseas. So, you want to help them grow as they go global and also with their needs in India.