The Decline of Foreign Banks in India: A Closer Look https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyN_WbUM-Fw
Moneylife News Bite
Why Foreign Firms Have Bit the Dust in the Financial Sector https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKko5oWZOBY May 8, 2024
Foreign banks once thrived in India's financial sector, but now they're retreating. Citibank, a retail finance pioneer, recently sold its Indian business to Axis Bank, echoing a broader trend. Standard Chartered and HSBC have minimal presence compared to local giants like HDFC Bank. Similarly, foreign mutual funds struggle, with many, including Morgan Stanley and Fidelity, leaving. This shift marks a departure from optimistic projections of the 1990s. Mismanagement and global crises favoured Indian firms, which capitalised on trends like digital banking. Foreign companies' short-term perspectives led to their exit, while Indian firms thrived. Watch the video as Debashis Basu explains.
https://www.moneylife.in/article/why-foreign-firms-have-bit-the-dust-in-the-financial-sector/74103.html While Indian entrepreneurs and managers have, indeed, shown tremendous talent and execution skills, the ‘Quit India’ policy for foreign financial companies has not happened by design, but by default.
Quite frankly, all the assumptions made in the mid-1990s about the Indian middle class have turned out to be wrong. There was no smooth surge in middle-class prosperity for foreign businesses to tap into because the Indian economy continued to be mismanaged. Productivity remained poor, corruption and taxes stayed high, and crony capitalism undermined infrastructure growth in the mid-2000s, resulting in bad loans of Rs20 lakh crore in PSBs.
when disruptive opportunities like the digital on-boarding of customers happened, domestic banks were better placed to scale up. Similarly, when the stock market took off post-Covid-19, domestic mutual funds and broking firms grew rapidly.
While the financial sector threw up clear winners (Indians) and losers (foreigners), note the same has not happened in other sectors. For example, foreign companies in personal products have not quit. Their powerful presence continues. Indian companies have not made much headway in winning market shares from multinational companies like Colgate and Hindustan Lever.
The reason foreigners have lost out in the financial services business is because they have been impatient and had a short-term view—perhaps those traits come from the nature of the financial services business itself.