Eminent banker Aditya Puri, who on October 26 retired as Managing Director (MD) of HDFC Bank, is the world’s best banker, according to Economist.
Puri had started work as the HDFC bank’s first head 25 years back, and built the lender which now employs close to 1.20 lakh people.
Puri, who ended a career graph resembling Nike’s swoosh logo at Citibank to head a start-up long before it became a fad, has built a Rs 6.7 lakh crore empire and has left a footprint that would become an aspiration for many.
Aditya Puri was born in Gurdaspur district in Punjab and studied at Punjab University, Chandigarh, gaining a bachelor’s degree in Commerce.
He qualified as a Chartered Accountant with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India.
In order to assess Puri’s performance The Economist has compared total shareholder returns during his tenure with those achieved by the chief executives of the world’s top 50 banks, by market value (see chart).
Puri has delivered cumulative returns exceeding 16,000% over the quarter-century since his bank went public.
That is far more than any other boss in our sample, including Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, widely viewed as the leading banker of his generation.
This is not wholly a function of the length of Puri’s tenure: annualised total returns have been 22%, placing him among the top two.
The power of compounding means the absolute value created for shareholders during his tenure is a giant $83bn.