Window of Opportunity

Yes Bank has managed to tide over the moratorium to find credible investors. The lockdown is the latest challenge for the troubled lender, but new CEO Prashant Kumar is confident of sailing through with a digital focus

- Salil Panchal

Hours after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) lifted the moratorium on Yes Bank on March 19, the troubled lender’s newly appointed managing director and CEO Prashant Kumar decided to personally address customer concerns at the bank’s branches. What he saw at the Marine Drive branch in South Mumbai pleased him. “I was anxious that there would be a lot of customers. But there was no rush… I saw normal business and a few customers. It was comforting to learn that they were comfortable in dealing with the bank; there were no concerns and they had kept their deposits,” he tells Forbes India.

The interaction is hardly a metric to assess the bank’s health, but its newly structured board and Kumar will be breathing easy. After all, the moratorium was lifted two weeks ahead of its scheduled date of April 3 once a restructuring plan was approved. Banking operations have resumed as usual for its corporate and retail customers, and across its digital channels. Investor and depositor fears have been assuaged with the infusion of ₹10,000 crore additional capital into the bank, after a reconstruction plan was devised by the RBI and the government. Yes Bank’s common equity Tier1 (CET1), a key matrix, stands at 7.6 percent, against a worrisome 0.6 percent in December 2019.

Its newest investors are the State Bank of India—the largest public lender—housing finance firm HDFC and six private banks: ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Bandhan Bank, Federal Bank and IDFC First Bank.

During the lockdown on account of coronavirus, about 95 percent of Yes Bank’s 1,135 branches are operational and about 80 percent of its staff is working from home. Kumar and about 5,000 employees attend office.