The farewell

On 26 October 2020, Aditya Puri did what colleagues said he did every working day for 26 years: he left the office at 5:30 pm. He just did not come back the next morning. The send-off was a coronation; the fine print of his final months was already smudged.

The farewell ran 25 days and peaked in a 90-minute virtual event watched by over a lakh employees, with Shankar Mahadevan singing Puri's favourite old Bollywood numbers, a poem penned in his honour, and an anthem composed for him, as Mint reported. Bank House, the headquarters, was lit up all weekend with a giant portrait and a thank-you message. In an unusual gesture, rival ICICI Bank publicly thanked him for his contribution to Indian banking.

His successor was the insider's insider: Sashidhar Jagdishan, nearly three decades at the bank, handpicked and RBI-approved. At the handover ceremony, Puri spoke about the centrality of employees; Jagdishan thanked his boss and promised to carry the legacy forward.

Two obituaries

The same week, two very different assessments of the era were on record. The mainstream version: a banker who quit the Citi fast track, built India's most valuable bank from a rat-infested room, avoided every crisis, and left on time. The dissenting version, from commentator Hemindra Hazari: a legacy that also included regulatory non-compliance, mis-selling episodes, extreme target pressure on junior staff and opacity about irregularities - plus a warning that the bank should avoid the fate of Wells Fargo, the admired cross-selling machine Puri had praised before its mis-selling scandal.

Both versions cited the same facts. The GPS probe had broken in July. The RBI was already inside the vehicle-loan book. Four days before the farewell, the bank was weeks away from the Digital 2.0 ban. The machine Puri left behind was the most valuable in Indian banking - and it was about to be run by someone else when the first penalties landed.

"He left office at 5.30 pm, as he did every day. The bank he built would spend the next six years learning what his consistency had been covering."- The record, as the following chapters lay it out

The gamble that started it

The origin story is worth setting down precisely, because it explains the mythology the farewell was honouring. In 1993, Aditya Puri was Citibank's chief executive in Malaysia and had been identified among the top-50 emerging stars in Citi's worldwide franchise by its then chief executive John Reed, according to Rediff's career retrospective. He gave that up - including his Citigroup stock options - to run a start-up bank from a rat-infested room in Mumbai's Kamala Mills compound. The bank commenced operations in January 1995. Twenty-six years later, at his retirement, it employed close to 1.2 lakh people and was the most valuable bank in the country; the commentator Hemindra Hazari, writing the dissenting assessment, put its market capitalisation at US$92.1 billion and credited Puri's leadership, banking acumen and early reading of trends for insulating it from the crises that consumed the rest of Indian banking. Even the critics concede the construction. The argument of this book is about what was built into the walls.

The ritual of consistency

The detail that anchored every retirement profile was the 5:30 exit - the daily discipline, kept even on the last day, that stood for the whole management philosophy: process over heroics, cadence over charisma. The profiles sketched a man who did not carry a mobile phone, who ran the most valuable franchise in Indian finance on routine and refusal of drama. Understand what the ritual communicated to 1.2 lakh employees: the institution is bigger than any day in it, and its chief is a custodian, not a performer. It was genuine, by every account. It was also, as this dossier documents, a reputation that could cover a great deal. Consistency at the top is a management virtue. It is also a screen - behind it, the GPS device bundling, the incentive chains, the outage file and the audit culture documented in the surrounding chapters accumulated for years without disturbing the cadence one bit. The point is not that Puri pretended. The point is that a machine this consistent did not need him to.

The coronation

The send-off itself, as Mint reported, ran twenty-five days. It peaked in a ninety-minute virtual event watched by over a lakh employees - Puri, the senior leadership, current and former officials speaking; Shankar Mahadevan singing his favourite old Bollywood numbers; a poem penned in his honour; an anthem composed for him. Bank House, the headquarters, was lit up all weekend, one facade carrying a giant portrait and a thank-you message. Rival ICICI Bank publicly thanked him for his contribution to Indian banking - an unusual grace note between competitors. Puri's farewell speech dwelt on the centrality of employees; Jagdishan thanked his boss and promised to carry the legacy forward. Late that evening the bank informed the exchanges, as disclosure rules required, that the handover was complete.

Hold two facts from that same reporting side by side. First: the employees were the declared centre of the occasion. Second: this was the institution whose branch-level staff, in the same period, were working under the target-pressure regime documented in Chapter 3 - the regime the new chief executive would himself acknowledge in the FY2023 annual report, in language unusual enough for a commentator to call it commendable candour. Both facts are true. The distance between the stage version of the institution and the ledger version is the subject of this entire dossier.

The pay ledger

One number from the farewell reporting deserves its own line: ₹180.49 crore. That was Puri's FY2020 compensation, making him the highest-paid executive in the country, as Mint's retirement report noted. Set it against the compensation structure documented in the machine and people chapters - the 2.5 per cent incentive slice, the ₹18,000-19,000 GPS devices pushed through loan files, the frontline salaries the annual report itself flagged for falling short of a living wage. The point is not that the pay was illegitimate; shareholders got a US$92 billion institution for it. The point is the shape of the pyramid: a chief executive compensated at national-record levels atop a machine whose economics depended, at the other end, on some of the most aggressive target pressure in Indian retail banking. A farewell is a moment for proportion. Proportion is what this ledger supplies.

The dissenting assessment, in full

The mainstream retirement coverage was a coronation. The other assessment on record deserves equal space, because it made its case from the record rather than from grievance. Hemindra Hazari - a market commentator writing as a disclosed small shareholder - published his evaluation the day before the farewell. Its structure is what makes it hard to dismiss: it opens by crediting Puri, unambiguously, with building India's most valuable bank and reading industry trends earlier than his peers. Then it sets down the other ledger: what Hazari called a history of non-compliance with banking norms and regulation, which he argued was publicly visible as far back as 1990, when Puri headed Citibank's corporate business in India; the practices highlighted by the Cobrapost expose of the banking industry; the mis-selling of products to unsuspecting customers; extreme target pressure on lower-level staff; and a lack of transparency with stakeholders about irregularities and sudden senior exits.

The detail Hazari hung the whole argument on was a quote - Puri's own, public and repeated: "Nothing moves here without my consent." Hazari's point was structural. If that boast was true, then the unsavoury aspects of the model were not accidents of scale or the misdeeds of a few bad apples; they ran through a machine whose chief had claimed personal oversight of everything that moved. And if the boast was not true - if things did move without his consent - then the control mythology at the centre of the legend was just that. Either reading was uncomfortable. Hazari's parting warning was the sharpest line in the retirement coverage anywhere: the new leadership, he wrote, should ensure the bank avoided the fate of Wells Fargo - the admired American cross-selling machine that Puri himself had praised, before its fake-accounts scandal destroyed its reputation. In 2020 that warning read as provocative. Read it again after the chapters on commissions, pressure and mis-selling in this book. It reads as early.

What was already in the file

The farewell's timing is the chapter's whole irony. By 26 October 2020, the following were all already on the record. The GPS probe had broken in July, when Bloomberg reported on the bundled device sales in the vehicle-loan book. At the bank's own annual general meeting that summer, Puri had addressed it directly: whistleblower complaints had been received, internal enquiries had found no conflict of interest and no bearing on the loan portfolio, but had found "personal misconduct exhibited by a set of individuals" for which disciplinary action was taken. Ashok Khanna, the vehicle-finance head who participated in that enquiry, had superannuated on 31 March 2020 and was telling reporters the retirement was per original terms and that there was "an attempt to malign my name and reputation." The Reserve Bank was already inside the vehicle-loan book. And the outage file - two years of internet-banking, mobile-banking and payment failures - was already compiled at the regulator. Five weeks after the last 5:30 exit, the RBI would stop the bank's flagship digital programme and its market-leading card engine in a single order.

This is what the coronation was covering: not a scandal about to break, exactly, but a file about to thicken. The clean exit - on time, on schedule, at the top of the market - meant the first penalties of the modern era landed on the successor's desk, over conduct accumulated on the predecessor's watch. Nobody at the ninety-minute event said so. The chapters of this book that follow the farewell - the regulator's knock, the buried audit, the merger, the slide, the boardroom crisis of 2026 - are, in one reading, the story of what was handed over that evening, item by item.

The successor's candour

Postscript, from the new regime's own pen. In the FY2023 annual report, Sashidhar Jagdishan did something his predecessor never did in twenty-six years of shareholder letters: he publicly acknowledged abusive behaviour in the bank's ranks - a toxic-work-culture admission unusual enough in Indian finance that even Hazari, the outgoing era's harshest chronicler, called it commendable candour. Set the two moments side by side and you have the whole transition in miniature. One era ended with an anthem composed for the chief and a lit-up headquarters. The next began by admitting, in print, to shareholders, that the machine's treatment of its own people had crossed lines. The farewell was the story the bank told about itself. The annual report three years later was the story the bank could no longer avoid telling. Both are in the record. This book reads them together.

The handpicked insider

The succession itself was the era's final demonstration of the machine's defining skill: continuity engineering. Sashidhar Jagdishan was nearly three decades into the bank when the board chose him - the insider's insider, the man who had run its financial nerve centre, handpicked by the outgoing chief and approved by the Reserve Bank. No outside candidate was seriously discussed; no search drama reached the press. The message to every constituency - regulators, investors, employees, customers - was that nothing was changing, because nothing needed to. And in the narrow sense the message was true: the strategy, the franchise, the efficiency ratios, the cross-sell engine all carried forward intact. But continuity is a claim with two edges, and the successor inherited both. He inherited the most valuable banking franchise in the country. He also inherited its file: the vehicle-loan enquiry already in the RBI's hands, the outage record already compiled, the incentive architecture already producing the conduct that would fill the next six years of supervisory correspondence. The handover ceremony's language - legacy carried forward, boss thanked - was accurate in ways its speakers may not have intended. Everything was carried forward. Everything.

Reading the farewell, seriously

It would be easy, and wrong, to read this chapter as a debunking. The career being honoured in October 2020 was genuinely exceptional: a bank built from a rat-infested room to the most valuable in the country, through liberalisation's chaos, the 2008 crisis, demonetisation, and every cycle between, without a capital raise in distress or a bailout in anger. The consistency was real. The discipline was real. The employees' affection, on the evidence of that lakh-strong audience, was real. What the farewell was also doing - what coronations are for - was fixing the official version while the fixer still had the stage. The official version said: a perfect bank, a perfect tenure, a perfect handover. The file already said otherwise, in small print, in supervisory correspondence, in AGM answers about personal misconduct. The purpose of this dossier's farewell chapter is not to take the anthem away. It is to note what was playing in the other room while it was sung - and to mark 26 October 2020 as the date the institution's story stopped being told by the man who built it, and started being told by the record he left behind.

The exit, precisely

End where every profile of the man ended: the door, at 5:30 in the evening. The ritual had run for twenty-six years, through the rat-infested room and the lit-up headquarters, through incorporation in 1994 and first operations in January 1995, through the cycles that broke lesser institutions. On Monday, 26 October 2020, Aditya Puri stepped out of Bank House having handed charge to his chosen successor, and the exchange filing that evening made it official. The mythology wants that exit to be the ending: the founder-custodian, leaving on time, his machine humming, his legend intact. The record insists on a different framing. The exit was not the ending of anything. It was a transfer of custody - of a franchise, a file, and a set of questions the machine's design had been deferring for years. The chapters after this one are those questions, arriving one by one at the successor's desk: the regulator's knock five weeks later, the buried audit, the penalties, the merger's indigestion, the slide, and the boardroom crisis that would eventually cost a chairman his job. Puri left at 5:30, as he always did. The bill, as it turned out, was still being calculated - and it would be presented to other people, in other years, in other chapters of this book.