UDAY KOTAK

My view is the core engine supporting India's growth aspiration will be the financial sector, which will have to get more efficient.

I do believe that banks are special - they are very leveraged institutions by nature; therefore, it's even more critical to ensure that the governance and the process of running a banking company are well-organised, managed and regulated.

Foreign investors are looking for a consistent and stable policy in India.

A lot of family members worked in the joint commodities family business. It was a classic case of capitalism at work and socialism at home.

We are going to position ourselves as a world-class financial institution. We want to do things that are comparable to the best in the world. At the same time, we want to have very strong human qualities.

We are extremely focused on building some of the assets which are going into mid-India, semi-urban and rural, and that's our DNA. We are building a retail bank, and a lot of the deposit base is still in urban India.

In equities, you price the risk. As far as debt is concerned, if the markets get more sophisticated where, for the levels of risks that you take, you get the debt returns, we will certainly look at it. It's back to a philosophy of risk-adjusted returns.

I keep wondering at night, 'Will I have a bank the next morning, or will some technology company be doing banking without needing a bank?'

If you look at 2009, why did the recovery happen? Recovery happened because somebody in the world's largest economy opened the tap: the U.S., followed by Europe and now Japan.

It is possible that the digital world may change the need for physical branches. We will continue to add branches incrementally, but we will reach a point - whether it is 1,500, 1,800 or 2,000 branches - where we will say enough is enough.

I am a believer in the journey and enjoying the journey.

Younger customers are the future, but older customers have the money. So you need both: one for the present, and the other for the future.

I would have loved to have been a cricketer.

The trouble with opportunity is, it never announces when it comes. It's only after it's gone, you'd realize that you missed it.

The single biggest resource India has is people and skill.

There is socialism in the family that conflicts with meritocracy. And that bothered me.

If what you create does not outlive you, then you have failed.

My view is that the bitcoin is in its very early days, and it is an artificial currency. But whether it is creating new money, whether it is sustainable, whether it would survive - I have many questions about it.

If India grows steadily and does the structural things right and carefully unties knots, builds an institutional process which sort of cleans up the corruption and the baggage in the system, I see it as a wonderful marathon.

The government should move towards supporting aspirations and not entitlement. Subsidies supporting non-productive growth should be reduced.

If you look at the history of large financial institutions, most of them have succeeded because of a deep presence in their home market.

Historically, in India, the strange fact was that the equity owner was not taking as much hit as the lender. Therefore, if we restore the first principle of economics, that first the equity owner needs to take the hit and then the lender, we will get a good solution.

Growth should take care of the fear of job losses. People will be challenged to do different things. For people who are not up to it, purely based on objective assessment, that's a different issue, which, you do it anyway.

Technology is an enabler; you have to be at the cutting edge of technology - there is no choice.

If companies are able to raise equity from the market, then their problems for financing incomplete projects will come to end. Investment cycle in the capital market can kick-start with the money of savers and investors.