One of the leading private sector banks in India, ICICI Bank continues to focus on reimagining banking and leveraging digital capabilities, anchored to our commitment to be a trusted financial partner for our customers.
Fiscal 2023 saw the Bank continue to achieve profitable growth in its business, strengthen its franchise and invest in building capabilities for the future. The Bank continued to grow its core operating profit less provisions (i.e. profit before tax excluding treasury gains) led by a 360º customer-centric approach and exploring opportunities across ecosystems and micromarkets, within the guardrails of compliance and risk management. The Bank’s core operating profit less provisions grew by 43.0% during fiscal 2023 to ₹424.73 billion. The Bank continued to grow its business with a focus on granularity and increased the domestic loan portfolio by 20.5% year-on-year to ₹9,855.29 billion. The Bank focussed on further enhancing the liability franchise, maintaining a stable and healthy funding profile and a competitive advantage in cost of funds. During fiscal 2023, the Bank continued to maintain a strong balance sheet, with robust liquidity, prudent provisioning and healthy capital adequacy. The Bank’s capital adequacy ratios were significantly above regulatory requirements as at March 31, 2023.
Financial parameters of return of capital and containment of provisions within targeted levels are boundary conditions in the pursuit of opportunities and growth. The Bank is also fostering a strong risk and compliance culture to ensure a balance of risks and rewards. Building trust with all stakeholders is critical to the Bank’s growth.
The Bank’s efforts towards building a sustainable business continued to be anchored by the principles of 'Return of Capital', 'Fair to Customer, Fair to Bank' and 'One Bank, One Team, One ROE'. The Bank lays strong emphasis on serving customers with transparency and offering suitable banking solutions, while maintaining stringency in counterparty selection. As the Bank strengthens its digital capabilities and builds robust technology platforms to support growth at scale, it also focusses on investing in technology resilience and responsible practices.
Our investments in digital capabilities, enriched with efficient delivery, strong franchise and institutional knowledge have enabled the Bank to gain market share, and create new markets through ecosystems. Attracting new customers and deepening wallet share among existing customers to capture profit pools across segments, sectors and ecosystems is an important focus. Creating end-to-end digital journeys on ‘Insta’ products along with the open-architecture design of mobile applications and digital partnerships have enabled the Bank to differentiate its franchise and achieve profitable growth.
Customer-centricity is a key element underpinning our strategy to grow our business. Our approach begins with developing a deep understanding of customer needs, expectations and experiences. This understanding translates into products and solutions that offer a holistic banking experience, and beyond. The approach is to take the entire bank to the customer and offer solutions that meet the current and future needs of the customers and their ecosystems.
Delivering on the Customer 360º approach also requires strengthening and streamlining processes for better outcomes. The Bank is continuously making efforts to redesign processes and leverage tech-based solutions for more meaningful customer engagement. Underscored by strong governance, controls and risk management, the endeavour of the Bank is to deliver products and services to customers in an appropriate manner. As part of our Customer 360º approach, the Bank has strengthened its branches in terms of enabling constructive customer engagement, decision-making and accountability, thereby transforming branches into business centres.
In the last three years, the Bank has made significant strides in developing digital customer journeys and platforms offering comprehensive banking services. ICICI STACK was one such initiative that was launched during the first wave of Covid-19 pandemic, enabling customers to continue availing uninterrupted banking services. This has been enhanced over the years, and using ICICI STACK, the Bank is offering solutions on digital platforms ensuring uninterrupted banking experience for all types of customers. The Bank has been creating intuitive customer journeys and offering personalised solutions to suit their life stage and business needs. Services offered include instant digital account opening, loan solutions, payment solutions, investments and insurance solutions.
At the core of ICICI Bank’s customer-centric and service-oriented approach lies the in-depth profiling of each micromarket. Key anchors of the micromarket approach are data analytics, focus on aligned distribution, digital-first and relevant delivery model. The research and knowledge through analytics are used in conjunction with other factors for planning, resourcing, channel and product alignment, capability building and marketing and alliances. This helps the frontline teams to understand the markets in which they operate, and plan localised strategies with tailored propositions for customers. Through this approach, the Bank aims to realise the full potential of opportunities across segments and sectors in each micromarket.
Micromarket insights have helped the Bank in identifying optimal locations for opening new business centres and realigning the ATM and distribution network based on customer needs and market opportunity. The layouts, branding elements, staffing and capability building in these business centres are based on various market affinities. This has also helped the Bank to launch focussed marketing campaigns targeted at specific customer segments and establishing alliances with locally relevant partners who add value to our customers.
The Bank has further sharpened its approach to enhance relationship management across markets using Virtual Relationship Management (VRM). VRM is a cloud-based AI-powered platform providing a one-stop ecosystem for robust relationship building with customers and thereby improving the efficiency of relationship managers. The platform helps in relevant and meaningful customer interaction with the help of service and solution-based engagement.
In order to capture the growing markets in non-metro locations, the Bank has merged the retail and rural business groups. The organisational structure has been strengthened with ‘State Business Heads’ to capture the 360° opportunity in these geographies. Cities with large concentrated market opportunities have been organised under ‘City Business Heads’ covering the full spectrum of the ecosystem. All functions other than credit have been aligned with the state/city business head to enhance our on-field presence. Micromarket insights have also helped in setting up Credit Business Centres (CBC) closer to important markets for faster processing.
Business Centres (Branches)
ATMs and Cash Recycler Machines
Insta Banking Kiosks
In order to further strengthen Customer 360º solutions, during fiscal 2023 specific customer ecosystem propositions were launched for start-ups, capital market participants and students.
The Bank launched start-up ecosystem banking to cater to the banking needs of start-ups across their life stages through its domestic and international network, and business centre at Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City). The Bank offers comprehensive solutions in the areas of treasury, transaction banking, lending, managing foreign direct investments and regulatory compliances along with personal banking services for employees and founders.
The Bank launched an array of digital solutions for capital market participants and clients of custody services. The solutions enable various participants including brokers, portfolio management service providers, Foreign Portfolio Investors, Foreign Direct Investors and Alternative Investment Funds to seamlessly meet all their banking requirements.
The Bank launched Campus Power, an online platform providing various banking solutions such as loans, bank accounts, foreign exchange remittances and value-added services to the student ecosystem for higher education in India and abroad.
The Bank has created over 20 industry-specific STACKS which provide bespoke solutions to meet specific needs of these industries. The Bank aims to serve the entire value chain of corporates ranging from channel partners, dealers, vendors, employees and other stakeholders, thereby taking the full bank to the customer. During fiscal 2023, the Bank launched STACKs for export and real estate sectors. The export STACK, 'Digital solutions for Exporters', is a comprehensive set of banking and value-added services on a single platform. It aims to digitise the entire export life cycle – from discovery of export markets, export finance, foreign exchange services to receipt of export incentives. The digital set of solutions include services like Instant Export Packing Credit (InstaEPC), trade accounts (Exchange Earners’ Foreign Currency Account and One Globe Trade Account), paperless exports solutions like e-Docs and e-Softex, foreign exchange solutions, digital letter of credit facility (e-LC), electronic bill of lading (e-BL), value-added services and Trade APIs.
The Real Estate STACK provides 360° banking solutions for builders, non-banking financial companies, buyers and Alternative Investment Fund / Real Estate Investment Trusts. It offers banking solutions such as digital opening of bank accounts and providing account number for Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) registration, construction finance, inventory funding and lease rental discounting to cater to their financial needs, depending on the life cycle stage of a project. In addition, it enables clients to manage their payment obligations to vendors, employees, utility providers and statutory payments efficiently. Further, it helps builders to manage their digital collection, reconciliation, surplus distribution, custodial services, collect rent through lease income and distribute the surplus to the investors.
The Bank’s strategy in the merchant ecosystem space involves onboarding merchants through acquiring platforms or by providing them payment gateways and then cross-selling other financial products and services seamlessly. The Merchant STACK offers a bouquet of banking services, digital store management and other value-added services to customers. The number of active merchants grew by 43% year-on-year as at March 31, 2023.
As at March 31, 2023, the Bank had 13 exclusive business centres for ecosystem banking across Mumbai, National Capital Region (NCR) and Kolkata. These ecosystem business centres are full service centres that house multi-functional teams with expertise required to meet the needs of corporate customers and bringing the entire bouquet of services of the Bank to these corporates and their ecosystem.
Collaborating within the organisation and building partnerships across the value chain is a key focus area. Partnerships with technology companies and platforms with large customer bases and operational excellence offer unique opportunities for growth and enhancing service delivery and customer experience.
The Bank has key partnerships with Amazon, MakeMyTrip and Emirates to offer co-branded credit cards. Amazon Pay credit cards continued to see healthy traction with over four million credit cards issued till March 31, 2023. The Bank aims to provide 360° solutions to the new-to-bank customers that have been acquired through Amazon Pay credit cards.
The growth in credit card transactions was driven by higher activation rate through digital onboarding of customers, acquiring progressive profile customers, automated and effective portfolio management. The Bank has not only pioneered the usage of FASTag for payments at various national, state highway, toll plazas but also expanded use cases to parking payments at airports, malls, hospitals and tech parks across the country. The Bank has also continued its growth in value of UPI acquiring transactions by growing faster than the ecosystem.
The Reserve Bank of India launched the first pilot for retail digital rupee in December 2022, and ICICI Bank was one of the banks to participate in this pilot.
The Bank collaborates with and invests in fintech start-ups and co-develops products aligned with the Bank’s digital roadmap. The Bank’s Start-up Engagement and Investment team has been at the forefront to leverage innovation in the start-up and technology ecosystem. The engagements with the start-ups are focussed on payments, digital lending, customer experience, risk management and platforms. The Bank is also offering a host of APIs and Software Developer Kits (SDKs) which facilitate third-party apps to offer payment solutions for their retail customers.
With opportunities arising out of digital adoption, government’s push and creation of large scale digital public infrastructure, the Bank envisions banking and financial services becoming omnipresent and centrepiece of every transaction. Partnerships with start-ups help enable quicker adoption of new-age technologies at scale such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, blockchain, computer vision, cloud computing and more. Additionally, new-age tools and solutions help mitigate risks such as cyber threats and social frauds, arising out of the growing digital ecosystem. In this context, the Bank has adopted a technological approach that enables it to respond to the changing dynamics in an agile and responsive manner.
The Bank has endeavoured to help customers to transact on digital platforms by launching many user-friendly payment solutions. The Bank continued on its journey to strengthen its position by designing seamless, simple and secure experiences for customers, facilitating higher volumes of transactions and prompting recurrent digital transactions. The open architecture platforms have enabled the Bank to extend banking services to non-ICICI Bank account holders. Digital channels continue to account for over 90% of financial and non-financial transactions.
iMobile Pay: One App Strategy
The Bank’s iMobile Pay open architecture based mobile application provides seamless and end-to-end digital journeys. It is centred on providing a comprehensive and unified banking experience to customers through a single mobile application. This strategy entails integrating various banking services, features and functionalities into one cohesive app, allowing customers to access and manage their accounts, perform transactions, avail of financial products and services and engage with the Bank seamlessly. The coverage of iMobile Pay app has expanded to standalone asset customers, credit card customers and non-ICICI Bank account holders. Video KYC continued to empower retail customers to complete ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) process through video interaction within a few minutes. Video KYC is live for 16 products, including re-KYC.
The features ‘Pay to Contact’ and ‘Scan to Pay’ introduced in fiscal 2022 continued to drive payments growth in fiscal 2023. Other features introduced on iMobile Pay include the personal finance management solution, a unique personal finance, expense and budget management tool to engage with customers digitally and help them manage their finances effectively. The app also introduced a ‘One view card’, a dedicated card in the app, where customers can see all pre-approved loans and card offers in one click. There are over 400+ services on the app, with a unique voice search that makes navigation across these services quick and convenient.
iLens
iLens is an industry-first end-to-end digital lending platform covering all stages, starting from application to disbursement with the objective of providing superior transaction experience and enhanced operational efficiency. It is built on the Bank’s philosophy of open architecture. It is a future-ready solution which harnesses digital collaborations from fintech ecosystem. It is a device responsive platform with flexibility to access from mobile/ tablet (Android and iOS both) and provide on-the-go retail lending solution with its mobile application.
It offers a wide range of digital solutions like instant sanctions to existing as well as new-to-bank customers, digital disbursements (e-sign and e-stamp) and digital KYC verifications. It is enabled with an in-house robust rule engine facilitating efficient decisioning and standard implementation of various policy, process and regulatory norms.
iLens has an inbuilt customer interface 'TrackMyLoan' through which the customers can track real-time status of their loan application, submit documents, respond to queries and access various communications and documents like sanction letter, fees acknowledgement.
Mortgage is the first retail product which went live on iLens platform and other retail products are in the process of being onboarded. This is expected to further enable the Bank to provide enhanced customer experience and increase its ability to capture the entire Customer 360° ecosystem in a frictionless and digital way, thereby creating value for customer and the Bank.
InstaBIZ: Universal App for Small Businesses
InstaBIZ is a one-stop solution for all banking needs catering to small and medium enterprises (SME), individuals, proprietors and merchants. The Bank has seen an increase in the engagement level of customers on the InstaBIZ app.
In line with evolving trends of shift towards open architecture, the InstaBIZ app is interoperable and is available to both ICICI Bank customers and
non-customers for availing the multiple product offerings. Any customer can now open current account instantly through video KYC via seamless paperless journey. The digital process uses the private lender’s APIs that auto fills the account opening form, instantly validates PAN/Aadhaar number and allows the opening of account through Video KYC. Non-ICICI Bank customers using feature of InstaOD plus can get instant sanction of collateral-free loan up to ₹2.5 million, which can be availed post opening of current account.
Customers can also access the digital platform, Trade Emerge which offers solutions beyond banking for cross-border trade. Through alliance partners, it provides services like business incorporation, regulatory guidelines, partner discovery and logistics and cargo tracking. The ‘Manage and Grow your Business’ section within InstaBIZ is powered by multiple banking partners for accounting, taxation, analytics and networking. Customers can enjoy the feature of auto-reconciliation with accounting partners, which gives the customer a single click experience for all his business needs without having to manage between different platforms.
Digital Platforms and Solutions for Corporate Customers
ICICI Bank offers digital products and services for large corporates and their ecosystems including platforms for domestic and international trade and industry-specific solutions across the value chain. The Bank has created more than 20 industry-specific STACKs which provide bespoke and purpose-based digital solutions to corporate clients and their ecosystems. The four main pillars of ICICI STACK for corporates includes digital banking solutions for companies; digital banking services for channel partners, dealers and vendors; digital banking services for employees; and curated services for senior client personnel.
During the year, ICICI Bank launched Instant Export Packing Credit (Insta EPC) an industry-first product aimed at instantly and digitally meeting the export finance requirements of exporters and ensuring no disruptions in supply chain. The process automates the entire scrutiny cycle through integrations with various internal and external applications. This ensures that disbursement happens ‘@click’. Electronic Bank Guarantee (eBG) is an Application Programming Interface (API) based digital workflow, in partnership with National E-Governance Services Limited, which eliminates physical issuance, stamping, authentication and paper intensive record maintenance of bank guarantees. eBG will revolutionise the way bank guarantees are traditionally being issued and stored. The Bank’s Trade Online platform allows customers to perform most of their trade finance and foreign exchange transactions digitally. The value of transactions on the Trade Online platform grew by 47% year-on-year in fiscal 2023.
Supply chain financing is a focus area towards deepening the Bank's coverage of the corporate ecosystem. The wide range of supply chain and structured trade products offer a one-stop solution to corporate clients and their supply chain partners, helping in optimising their working capital needs and increasing efficiencies in their ecosystem. These supply chain solutions are offered digitally through various platforms namely OneSCF, FSCM, CorpConnect and DigitalLite, wherein corporates can seamlessly manage their supply chain requirements of payments, collections, data reconciliation and customised dashboards in a paperless environment thereby bringing in efficiencies in the corporates supply chain management.
The Bank has a strong focus on integrating banking with corporate ERP system using API not only for financial transactions but also for non-financial transactions. Few of these are fixed deposit creation, bank reconciliations, holding collections then validating with ERP and confirming before crediting to corporate bank accounts. To give a one-stop solution for all statutory requirements of the customer, the Bank facilitates various online solutions for central and state mandate like direct tax, Goods and Services Tax (GST), custom duty and various other tax payments.
Digital Solutions for Non-Resident Indians
Non-Resident Indians (NRI) banking continues to be a key growth driver for the Bank’s international banking business. The Bank launched the NRI Program Banking framework to renew the perspective from a liabilities based approach only to a more comprehensive Customer 360° approach. The framework encompasses various aspects of financial and non-financial needs for the entire family.
The Bank introduced a new bouquet of credit cards for NRI customers to enable them with their international and domestic spends while meeting their aspirations. Smart-Wire (for SWIFT based online transfers) has been made live for customers on Retail Internet Banking and iMobile Pay, enabling the customers to submit the declarations digitally, book the foreign exchange deal and track the remittance status.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) enabled payment platform, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has been leveraged to enable cross-border remittances for the India-Singapore corridor, with ICICI Bank being one of the six banks identified by RBI for this pilot project. This enables seamless and instant payment to and from Singapore for transactions up to SGD 1,000 in a day for family maintenance and gift. The Bank continued leveraging iMobile Pay channel for outward remittances by focussing on existing and new-to-product customers with the initiative of sending confirmation to the remitters for credit to beneficiaries making it easy for tracking the update on the outward remittance transactions.
During fiscal 2023, the Bank launched a new platform, Neo Remittance System (NRS) for outward remittances by business centres with advanced functionalities like rate booking and smart repeat transactions for transfers by both, residents (including non-account holders) and non-residents.
In fiscal 2023, the Bank continued to progress on its journey from Bank to BankTech with data serving as the foundation for informed decision-making leading to the creation of comprehensive value propositions and enhanced experience for customers. ICICI Bank is constantly upgrading and strengthening the technology infrastructure with a goal to make it secure, stable and resilient. This encompasses expanding online banking services, leveraging data analytics to extract valuable insights and improve decision-making and embracing emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain. The Bank’s wide range of digital offerings including the rapidly growing digital transactions, the web of interconnected platforms, applications and databases requires a robust technology architecture, which revolves around the four pillars of scalability, availability, resiliency and security.
The key priorities that dominate the Bank’s technology requirements include its technology platforms, embedded banking, cloud adoption and data platforms and analytics.
The Bank has over 2,000 APIs for retail banking and nearly 200 APIs for corporate banking, with over 100 million financial and non-financial transactions per day.
As a part of the Bank’s technology strategy, it is creating an enterprise architecture framework across digital platforms, data and analytics, micro services based architecture, cloud computing, cognitive intelligence and other emerging technologies.
Each facet of the architecture considers basic foundational elements of scalability, modularity, agility, availability and resilience besides being cloud native and digitally native.
Technology advancements in cloud computing, data sciences and generative AI are redefining customer engagement opportunities. Business process optimisation through adoption of intelligent automation platforms including robotic processes have enabled efficiency across business and operational functions. These have brought about faster turnaround time besides enabling increased capacity for handling transaction volumes and customer requirements.
The changing technology landscape along with increased channels of interaction also mean increased focus on information security across various aspects of technology beginning from data centre to the cloud to the entire technology supply chain. While speed and quality continue to remain focus of technology delivery, DevSecOps has enabled integrate information security along the life cycle. The integrated approach to security enables the Bank to respond to changing dynamics in an agile and responsive manner.
APIs for Retail Banking
APIs for Corporate Banking
Financial and non-financial transactions per day
The Bank has a dedicated data science and analytics team that works across business areas on projects relating to business analytics, decision strategies, forecasting models, machine learning, rule engines and performance monitoring. We maintain a comprehensive enterprise-wide data warehouse and employ statistical and modelling tools for leading-edge analytics.
Improving operational efficiencies through digitised processes and removing redundancies in serving customers has been providing significant opportunities for the Bank to strengthen the response time to customers. In fiscal 2023, the Bank increasingly focussed on delivering customer delight and enhancing advocacy by reimagining processes and customer experiences. The Bank aimed to leverage the power of subtraction in its service delivery framework through deletion of non-value adding processes, simplification, decongestion and digitisation of customer journeys and processes. The onboarding and servicing experience has been enhanced through initiatives such as iLens (end-to-end loan journey platform), digital current account onboarding using video KYC, single enterprise level CRM platform, Virtual Relationship Manager (VRM) platform etc. In addition, new-age technologies and platforms such as TradeIntelli, Neo Remittance System, next-gen phone banking experience and digitisation of card life cycle are being harnessed to enable the Bank to serve customers with simplicity.
The principle of 'One Bank, One Team, One ROE', emphasises the need to maximise the Bank’s share of the target opportunity across all products and services. The Bank has taken steps to organise and structure teams in a way which facilitates the Bank’s approach to Customer 360°. The Bank has also invested in aligning the organisation around micromarkets and customer ecosystems by increasing the density of leadership in key markets. The cash component of variable pay (performance bonus) is aligned to the philosophy of 'One Bank One Team' as it is based on overall performance of the Bank and reflects reward for team performance.
The Bank’s focus on Customer 360° banking requires employees to have multi-product knowledge and skills. The Bank has invested in training its employees and enhancing their ability to comprehensively serve customers. The Bank has a capability building architecture spanning across functional training, leadership development, digital and industry-academia programmes to equip employees with the required skillsets. Additionally, job rotation enables employees to seek a wider perspective of banking products and services, and go beyond their defined roles to spot opportunities for 360° customer experiences. The Bank continues to expand business opportunities across all customer segments within the guardrails of the Bank’s risk and compliance framework.
The principle of ‘Fair to Customer, Fair to Bank’ emphasises the need to deliver fair value to customers while creating value for shareholders, which would guide the Bank’s operations. The Bank seeks to sell products and offer services which meet societal needs and are in the interest of our customers. The Bank also strives to enable its employees to keep delivering a seamless customer experience.
ICICI Bank recognises the importance of establishing an effective framework and supporting processes so that all employees seek to exhibit values aligned to the risk and compliance culture policy. The aim is to uphold a strong risk and compliance culture throughout the Bank. The Risk and Compliance Culture Policy establishes the guiding principles and the framework for implementation of the same.
The retail business continued to be a key driver of growth in fiscal 2023, as we pursued a strategy of building a diversified and granular loan portfolio. The Bank’s retail portfolio grew by 22.7% year-on-year to ₹5,578.17 billion at March 31, 2023. Retail loans accounted for 53.9% of total loans, and including non-fund based outstanding, the share was 45.7% in the total portfolio. The Bank has undertaken several initiatives to offer a convenient and frictionless experience to customers by digitising the entire underwriting process, with instant loan approvals.
The Bank continued to maintain a robust funding profile with strong growth in the deposit base. Total deposits increased by 10.9% year-on-year to ₹11,808.41 billion at March 31, 2023. Savings account deposits, on a daily average basis, grew by 13.3% year-on-year in fiscal 2023. Current account deposits, on a daily average basis, grew by 13.5% year-on-year in fiscal 2023. Term deposits grew by 17.1% year-on-year to ₹6,395.79 billion at March 31, 2023. The growth in the deposit franchise was supported by ongoing efforts to strengthen the Bank’s digital platforms and process simplification to provide a seamless banking experience to customers.
The Bank's strategy to serve the rural segment of economy is based on the integrated nature of the rural ecosystem. The operational structure and offerings put the Bank in a unique position to leverage opportunities in different ecosystems within the rural markets. The Bank offers a diverse set of products catering to end-to-end needs in the value chain. These products include working capital loans for growing crops and financing of post-harvest activities, term loans including farm equipment loans, financing against warehouse receipts, loans against gold jewellery, along with personal loans, affordable housing finance and auto and two-wheeler loans. The Bank also provides consumption loans for low-income customers. Financial solutions are offered to micro-finance institutions, self-help groups, co-operatives constituted by farmers and corporations and Small and Medium Enterprises engaged in agriculture-linked businesses. The Bank’s rural portfolio grew by 13.8% year-on-year to ₹874.31 billion at March 31, 2023.
The Bank has identified four main ecosystems in the rural market, which include farmers, dealers, self-employed persons and micro-entrepreneurs with comprehensive banking solutions offered across these ecosystems.
The Bank’s reach in rural areas comprises a network of business centres, ATMs, field staff and business correspondents providing last-mile access in remote areas. Of the Bank’s network of 5,900 business centres, 51% are in rural and semi-urban areas with 651 business centres in villages that were previously unbanked. There were 4,299 ATMs and cash recycler machines at semi-urban and rural centres at March 31, 2023 having a proportion of 25.8% of pan India ATMs and cash recycler machines.
The Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) portfolio comprises exposures to companies with a turnover of up to ₹2.50 billion. The Bank’s business banking portfolio comprises small business customers with an average loan ticket size of ₹10.0-15.0 million. The business banking portfolio grew by 34.9% to ₹721.12 billion and accounted for 7.0% of the overall portfolio at March 31, 2023. The Small and Medium Enterprises segment grew by 19.2% to ₹482.21 billion and accounted for 4.7% of the overall portfolio.
The growth in the SMEs portfolio is driven by the Bank’s approach of catering to 360° need of customers across business life cycle.
The growth in the portfolio was driven by the Bank’s approach of catering to 360° needs of customers across business life cycle ranging from onboarding, payment & collection, cross-borders, account reconciliation besides working capital requirements. Envisaging these customer requirements, the Bank devised comprehensive digital solutions & platforms which are also fulfilled through Do-it-Yourself and Do-It-for-Me through our business centres, InstaBIZ mobile apps and the Bank’s website and also partner websites. In addition, a dedicated Relationship Manager also provides the customers full 360° solutions.
The Bank’s focus in these businesses continues on parameterised and programme-based lending, which is granular and well-collateralised. The Bank has devised an integrated underwriting approach which is scorecard driven. Leveraging digital tools and data analytics, the Bank has built various scorecards namely Unicore and Infinity, which caters across customers, turn ranges and loan ticket size. A combination of qualitative and quantitative assessment tools are utilised to arrive at the final credit decision. Additionally to cater specifically to the micro segment, the Bank has a surrogate programme-based underwriting which considers non-financial documents such as bank statement and Goods and Services Tax (GST) returns for credit assessment.
The Bank maintains a robust risk management framework to manage the SME and business banking portfolio. The Bank has established strong practices to fuel growth by collateralised-lending and reduce concentration risks by focussing on granular lending. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative assessment tools, the Bank aims to arrive at a score to determine the lending criteria. The Bank constantly monitors and analyses cases to detect stress, thus enabling the Bank to take early action and ensuring a healthy portfolio quality. The Bank has further strengthened its underwriting process by integrating various digital tools like bank statement analyser, automatic fetching of bureau reports and enhanced business rule engine to generate probability of default scores for score-based analysis into one single ecosystem called 'Infinity'.
The Bank’s wholesale banking customers include large private sector business houses and companies, financial institutions and banks, public sector undertakings and Central and State government entities. The Bank also has a strong franchise among Multi-National Corporations (MNCs), real estate companies, IT & ITES and new-age services companies, along with a strong franchise in the financial sponsors space with special focus on private equity funds and their investee companies. Additionally, the Bank also caters to the requirements of the capital market and custody participants through unique digital solutions improving their operational efficiency.
The Bank’s approach has been to deepen its partnership and provide support to clients through their entire life cycle. The Bank caters to all needs of the clients across trade, treasury, bonds and commercial papers through its comprehensive and technologically-advanced delivery platforms while also catering to the needs of their supply chain network.
The Bank aims to become a business partner to its clients instead of being merely a capital provider. With the client at the centre, all the teams across the Bank are well-aligned to offer the entire Bank’s offerings to wholesale clients and their ecosystems. This has not only made client servicing more effective, but also helped in deepening the Bank’s relations in high-value retail accounts of senior client personnel and employees through a suite of retail products like salary, private and wealth banking, home loans, personal loans, vehicle loans, etc.
Solutions like CorpConnect and DigitalLite enable corporates to seamlessly manage supply chain financing, payments, collection and reconciliation requirements of their dealers and vendors in a convenient and paperless process.
Supply chain financing is an integral part of the corporate ecosystem and solutions like CorpConnect and DigitalLite enable corporates to seamlessly manage supply chain financing, payments, collection and reconciliation requirements of their dealers and vendors in a convenient and paperless process. These solutions also automatically assess the eligibility of the client’s dealers and vendors for credit through a business rule engine, Goods and Services Tax (GST) returns, intelligent algorithm with automated bureau checks and dedupe checks.
The Bank has extensively leveraged analytics to monitor transactions and portfolio quality. While new credit is extended in a granular manner to well-established and high-rated business groups, data analytics is used for portfolio monitoring and identification of early warning signals in the existing portfolio. This has led to enhancement of the overall quality of the corporate portfolio.
ICICI Bank’s international presence consists of business centres in six overseas locations and representative offices in nine locations outside India. The Bank has Offshore Banking Unit (OBU) in Mumbai and IFSC Banking Unit (IBU) in GIFT City, and wholly-owned subsidiaries in the United Kingdom (UK) and Canada. ICICI Bank UK also has a business centre in Germany.
The Bank’s international franchise focusses on four strategic pillars, namely the NRI ecosystem comprising deposits, remittances, investments and asset products; the MNC ecosystem comprising both foreign MNCs investing in India and Indian MNCs for their foreign currency and other India related requirements as well as Global Capability Centres (GCC), which are back-offices of MNCs created to serve the world; trade ecosystem, comprising primarily India-linked trade transactions which are self-liquidating in nature; and funds ecosystem, to capture fund flows into India through the Foreign Portfolio Investment (FPI) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) route.
The Bank continued to progress in its strategic objective of reducing the non-India linked exposures in a planned manner. The non-India linked corporate portfolio reduced by 52.3% year-on-year or by USD 0.34 billion during fiscal 2023.
The Bank’s IFSC Banking Unit (IBU) in GIFT City attempts to capture global banking requirements of ICICI Bank India's client base to enhance Customer 360° banking experience. IBU business centre complements our domestic business by providing foreign currency banking solutions across corporate banking, funds, wealth management, global markets business and start-up ecosystem. ICICI Bank is a settlement banker to all three exchanges in GIFT City – NSE IFSC, India INX & IIBX. The Bank has also obtained clearing, custody and depository participant licence. On the Start-up ecosystem front, GIFT City is focussing on onboarding the overseas holding and subsidiaries of Indian start-ups.
Government is transitioning towards efficient financial management and transparency in transactions through digitisation and direct benefit transfer (DBT). ICICI Bank has been providing a range of banking services to government departments and their ecosystem through a network of physical and digital channels.
The Bank offers its government customers integrated and plug-n-play digital solutions, to assist them in effective delivery of services to stakeholders including citizens. The Bank is assisting state-level agencies and last-mile implementing agencies for adoption of Single Nodal Agency (SNA) payment model and DBT payments for management of Government of India scheme funds.
ICICI Bank's digital platforms provide simple online tax payment options to customers. The Bank is assisting the government for collection of central taxes, state taxes, customs duty, GST payments through authorised business centres and digital platforms. The Bank has also integrated its payment services with the e-governance initiative of government like Government e-Marketplace (GeM), e-tendering and e-treasury.
Our Business Model
