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After taking singles last year, now positioned to go for the boundaries: HDFC Bank CEO

After taking singles last year, now positioned to go for the boundaries: HDFC Bank CEO

The Hindu14-07-2025
With FY25 being the first full year of the merger of HDFC Ltd. into HDFC Bank Ltd. and having built upon it, HDFC Bank, India's largest private sector lender, is now eyeing sizeable growth in the future, a top executive said.
'The successful playing out of the merger synergies, the reduction in the credit deposit ratio and the large-scale mobilisation of deposits, all constitute tailwinds for the bank,' Sashidhar Jagdishan, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, HDFC Bank Ltd said in the bank's annual report which was released on Monday.
'To use a cricketing analogy, we focused on taking singles in the year that concluded and are now positioned to go for the boundaries,' he said.
He said as a merged entity, the HDFC Bank Group has several key subsidiaries with businesses in life as well as general insurance, mutual funds and brokerage, positioning it as a strong financial services conglomerate.
'The mortgage business which was a key component of the merger, has grown from strength to strength and is now the largest in the country. This portfolio has also been a catalyst for increased cross-selling opportunities within the HDFC Bank Group,' he said.
Stating that more than 95% of the incremental home loan customers were now opening Current Account Savings Accounts with the bank, with over half of them opting for additional product offerings, he said this had enhanced customer convenience.
He said the Bank's NBFC (Non-Banking Financial Company) subsidiary, HDB Financial Services Ltd was recently listed in accordance with regulatory requirements.
Mr. Jagdishan said that the bank's cybersecurity measures were focused on ensuring the highest level of protection against cyber threats, with proactive monitoring and automated incident response capabilities, enhanced network visibility and a zero-trust security model.
'We remain focused on being a cyber-resilient, regulatorily compliant and trusted institution that can adapt and succeed in the emerging risk landscape,' he added.
He said over the last four plus years, the bank had worked tirelessly on scaling, fortifying and modernising its technology backbone through enhanced investments on resources and collaboration with key partners and the results were now visible.
'Our core now seamlessly supports scalability and resiliency has been built by design. Our focus to further modernise through our 'Hollow the Core' programme is progressing well,' he added.
Mr. Jagdishan said in line with digital adoption GenAI would play a central role on 'how we innovate, stay resilient and create value for the future.'
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Substance vs form: All eyes now on Tiger Global case after SC's verdict on global hospitality leader Hyatt International
Substance vs form: All eyes now on Tiger Global case after SC's verdict on global hospitality leader Hyatt International

Time of India

time8 hours ago

  • Time of India

Substance vs form: All eyes now on Tiger Global case after SC's verdict on global hospitality leader Hyatt International

Mumbai: After the Supreme Court verdict last week on the global hospitality leader Hyatt International, all eyes are on the high-stake Tiger Global case , whose outcome, expected in August, could sway the fortunes of many foreign investors and force them to change the way they run their shops to bet on India. But, can the Hyatt ruling have a rub-off on the verdict on Tiger? With the same bench of judges that ruled on Hyatt to decide on Tiger-the question has cropped up among legal eagles, tax experts, and MNCs as the battle between Tiger, an offshore investor, and India's tax office nears a closure. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Villas For Sale in Dubai Might Surprise You Dubai villas | search ads Get Deals Undo The question stems from the court's observation that "legal form does not override economic substance". This single observation, according to several practitioners, may link the two cases, even though they pertain to different issues. THE COMMON LINK Live Events The Hyatt feud was over whether the foreign firm, acting as a consultant to an Indian hotel group, had a ' permanent establishment ' (PE) in India. The court-while observing that "legal form does not override economic substance" -said it did as Hyatt was not a typical consultant but was deeply involved in running the hotel in India, thanks to the terms of the deal. A 'PE' status means the foreign party would pay tax here on the portion of its global earnings attributable to India - and not just the tax deducted from its fees. The Tiger case, on the other hand, relates to 'capital gains' on sale of stocks - whether a Mauritius entity could escape tax in India merely on the back of the ' tax residency certificate ' (TRC) it obtained from the Mauritian authorities under the treaty the country has with India. Here is how the 'substance versus form' argument comes up: is TRC, a piece of paper, good enough to avoid tax by a shell entity which has no office, hires few or no employees, and has no power to make decisions? While the TRC gives it 'legal form', in reality, it may just be a paper outfit lacking 'substance'. "The Hon'ble SC regarded utmost importance to 'substance over form principle' and in doing so did a deep dive into the documents to ascertain 'control of operations', actual activities of employees and commercial agreements (like revenue linked service fees) in the Hyatt International matter. Substance over form , control and management and commercial substance are important factors that take centre stage even in treaty eligibility cases and a ruling in the case of Tiger Global is expected soon," said Ashish Mehta, partner at the law firm Khaitan & Co. A COURT REMINDS It's widely believed that armed with TRCs, many overseas private equity houses save tax on sale of shares (acquired before 2017) while foreign portfolio investors avoid tax on profits from equity derivatives as their investing arms are incorporated in treaty jurisdictions like Mauritius and Singapore. Many such arrangements would come unstuck, if the SC points at inadequate substance to rule against Tiger. "Recent rulings, from Formula One to Nestle SA to Hyatt International, demonstrate a consistent judicial approach: for any tax structure, the legal framework must align with the actual, factual substance of the arrangement. If not, the court may not grant tax relief in such cases," said Ashish Karundia, founder of the CA firm Ashish Karundia & Co. He feels that post Hyatt, chances are that non-residents may also be required to satisfy a 'substance' test in addition to holding a TRC when seeking treaty benefits. "Considering the greater scrutiny faced nowadays, it is essential to understand that the degree of reliability assigned to TRC is that of sufficient evidence rather than an irrebuttable evidence. It is sufficient, to begin with, but neither sacrosanct nor infallible!," said Karundia. The tax office had questioned Tiger Global's stand of not paying tax when it sold shares of Flipkart Singapore (holding shares of an Indian company) to another foreign investor (linked to Walmart) on the grounds that Tiger's Mauritius arm (the actual seller owning the Singapore entity) was only a vehicle used to avoid tax. Agreeing on the possibility of the court putting matters under the 'substance' lens, Rahul Garg, managing partner of Asire Consulting, which advises MNCs on tax, finance, assurance, and regulatory matters, said, "The court examined the commercial and operational realities to evaluate the degree of control and supervision by the foreign entity. It reiterated that legal form does not override economic substance. Since it's a fundamental requirement that tax treaties need to be availed in good faith, these observations could further support the Revenue's case if it can prove that the parent was an active participant with significant control and supervision in the decision making on investments by the entity which recorded the capital gains." It isn't the first time the court held substance over form. But that it chose to give a subtle reminder in the Hyatt ruling is lending itself to interpretation.

‘AI will gobble up most low-hanging jobs of coders'
‘AI will gobble up most low-hanging jobs of coders'

The Hindu

timea day ago

  • The Hindu

‘AI will gobble up most low-hanging jobs of coders'

Tech India is witnessing a transformational shift, with its bellwethers currently busy deploying their AI-first strategy to nurture increased human+AI collaborations at their workplaces. This means a few unpleasant things for the software developer community(software): most of the low-hanging, also some of the not so low-hanging coding jobs will go to their AI colleagues; AI will make some developers and their current contribution to coding fully redundant; developers will need to adapt and learn how to work with their AI partners. However, AI has the potential to free up developers from boring, repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on deep-coding, for complex, intelligent and creative projects. Lead tech players have been quite vocal about their focus on human+AI play, more so in the last couple of months, signalling an impending shift in the tech talent space. For instance, N. Chandrasekaran, Chairman of Tata Sons and Tata Group recently wrote to TCS shareholders, in the company's FY25 annual report, that the rise of automation promised a future of 'dark factories.' IT and business services were moving toward autonomous operations and the path was clear, he told shareholders adding, 'GenAI is not just another tech cycle — it is a civilisational shift. TCS is uniquely positioned to lead this transition.'' Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji, more recently at an annual general meeting said, AI, especially generative and agentic AI, was becoming a game-changer and it was helping his company to rethink how it should work and uncover new growth opportunities. Interestingly, both Wipro and Infosys recently announced the deployment of 200 AI agents each on certain functions to free up people. Infosys deployed 200 enterprise AI agents as part of its Infosys Topaz AI offerings and in collaboration with Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform. These AI agents are designed to automate complex workflows, enhance decision-making, and improve efficiency and reduce costs across various industries like healthcare, finance, telecom, retail, agriculture and manufacturing. Wipro said, agentic AI was already being integrated into core business processes, and it built over 200 agents in partnership with hyperscalers. These agents were meant to independently handle tasks across departments such as HR, finance, and legal, driving scaled efficiencies and outcomes. These are not coding jobs, however, analysts say these trends will solidify and become secular in time, redefining all job roles, including that of developers, across the industry. 'Given the transformational and disruptive capacity of AI, organisations no longer require an army of coders, most of them with low single digit experience in software development. 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'Most of the coding jobs as they exist today could be done by AI and coders will have to move to higher forms of architecture and system design,'' he forecast. Dr. Vikas Khare, Associate Dean School of Technology, Management and Engineering, NMIMS, at Indore said, many repetitive and template coding chores, including bug fixes, basic HTML/CSS web construction, basic CRUD operations, boilerplate generation, and test case writing, were currently being automated by AI. Junior-level programming positions involving predictable and well-documented problems have already started to be replaced by tools like GitHub Copilot, Replit AI, and low-code/no-code platforms, he noted. ``As generative AI models advance over the next five years, they will probably be able to manage increasingly complicated front-end development, backend API design, integration chores, and even some data analysis and pipeline building duties. 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The Algorithm Doesn't Care About Your Campaign
The Algorithm Doesn't Care About Your Campaign

Time of India

time2 days ago

  • Time of India

The Algorithm Doesn't Care About Your Campaign

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For decades, Indian marketers built competitive advantage through a unique combination of market insight, distribution muscle, and cultural storytelling. The best campaigns found resonance in complexity—navigating language diversity, regional behaviours, and socio-economic gradients with skill and empathy. But what happens when the tools to decode that complexity, create content around it, and distribute it at scale become democratised? When can a prompt generate a campaign draft, a product description, and a visual storyboard in seconds? When competitors are no longer limited to incumbent brands but include agile startups operating from dorm rooms with zero legacy constraints and infinite AI leverage? The marketing function is not facing obsolescence. But it is facing redefinition. The skills that once made teams effective—speed, executional polish, and replication at scale—are no longer scarce. What is scarce now is judgement, narrative integrity, ethical discernment, and contextual sensitivity. In a world where creation is infinite and attention is finite, it is not the marketer who produces the most content who will win. It is the one who knows what not to produce—and when. The Illusion of Mastery in a World of Infinite Tools One of the great traps of this moment is the illusion of control. Many Indian brands have rushed to adopt AI tools without revisiting the assumptions that underpin their marketing strategies. Creative workflows are being 'streamlined.' Copywriting is being automated. Personalization engines are being tested with pilot data sets. But in most cases, this is surface-level adaptation—efficiency gains applied to an outdated operating model. The danger lies in assuming that AI will simply plug into the existing architecture of marketing and enhance it. That's a misread. AI doesn't just optimize workflows; it alters the logic of value creation. It collapses cost structures, reduces differentiation, and compresses timelines. What used to be a premium capability—say, developing 50 versions of an ad for testing—is now trivial. A 2023 report by McKinsey estimates that GenAI can reduce creative production time by up to 40% and marketing content costs by 20–30%. This is particularly consequential in India, where marketing has often relied on scale and repetition as proxies for insight. But AI doesn't reward repetition. It amplifies originality—or punishes its absence. The Real Risk Isn't Job Loss. It's Strategic Irrelevance. Much of the current discourse focuses on job displacement—how many roles in marketing will be replaced, augmented, or reskilled. A Nasscom-Zinnov report predicts that by 2027, up to 45% of creative marketing tasks in India could be AI-assisted or fully automated. While that is a valid concern, it misses the deeper strategic threat: the erosion of marketing's central role in value creation. If marketers become mere executors of prompts generated elsewhere—whether by data teams, AI systems, or leadership—then the discipline risks becoming ornamental. To avoid this, Indian marketing leaders must confront a hard truth: marketing's future influence will depend not on how well it adapts to tools but on how ambitiously it redefines its mandate. This begins with reclaiming the responsibility to think. Over the past decade, marketing in many organisations has been reduced to a campaign factory—briefs in, creatives out. AI can perform that function more efficiently. But what AI cannot do, at least not yet, is reason about long-term brand equity, synthesize cultural undercurrents into insight, or weigh narrative risk in a volatile society. These are judgement calls. And they are becoming more important, not less. What Indian Marketers Must Do Differently First, they must invest in building internal AI literacy—not to turn marketers into data scientists, but to ensure that strategic decisions are made with an informed understanding of how AI systems function, where they fail, and what biases they embed. A 2024 study by WARC revealed that less than 18% of Indian marketers surveyed had formal training in AI systems, despite 73% expressing intent to increase AI investment. Second, marketers must reimagine their organisational structures. The traditional linear pipeline—from insight to brief to creative to media—assumes scarcity at every stage. That scarcity no longer exists. In its place is abundance, but with abundance comes the need for new filters. Functions like 'prompt engineering', 'cultural moderation', 'data narrative translation', and 'synthetic brand testing' may sound niche today, but they will be critical capabilities in tomorrow's marketing organisation. Third, marketing teams must recalibrate how they measure value. The metrics of the past—impressions, GRPs, CTRs—were always proxies. In an AI-driven landscape, they are not only insufficient but potentially misleading. What matters now is coherence. Does the brand's narrative hold together across fragmented channels and accelerated cycles? Does it build trust in an environment where synthetic content is indistinguishable from authentic voice? These questions require marketers to engage with harder-to-measure dimensions like meaning, memory, and perception at a systems level. India's Structural Advantage—If It's Claimed India is not at a disadvantage in this transition. In fact, it may have a unique edge—if it chooses to act on it. The very complexity that has long challenged Indian marketers—multilingual audiences, divergent digital maturity levels, and high platform fragmentation—can now become a training ground for globally relevant, AI-enhanced marketing systems. Digital consumption in India is projected to exceed 1.3 billion connected users by 2030, and vernacular content already accounts for over 60% of all online engagement. The data signals are rich, messy, and deeply human. AI trained on this complexity can power the next generation of cultural understanding and creative adaptation. But this requires ambition. Not the ambition of producing another award-winning campaign or chasing quarterly uplift, but the ambition to reshape what marketing does for the business and for society. There is a vacuum forming at the intersection of marketing, technology, and ethics. Indian marketers have an opportunity to step into that vacuum—not just to protect the discipline but to lead it into its next phase. This means becoming custodians of coherence in a world of content deluge. It means designing systems where human values are not just protected but encoded. It means thinking less like advertisers and more like architects of trust. The Future Is Not Waiting The pace at which GenAI is evolving will not slow down. OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo has already redefined multimodal engagement, and Google's Gemini is actively being embedded into consumer products at scale. The systems are improving. The expectations are rising. In such an environment, hesitation is not caution. It is irrelevance by another name. Marketing as we knew it is not coming back. But what can replace it—if we choose to build it—is something more rigorous, more intelligent, and far more consequential. The future of marketing in India will not be defined by how well we use AI. It will be defined by how deeply we understand what only humans can do—and have the courage to do more of it. (The author is managing partnet, Gnothi Seauton. Opinions are personal)

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