Aditya Puri is an Indian banker who was the founding managing director and CEO of HDFC Bank from September 1994 to 26 October 2020. In those 26 years he built it from a start-up in a Worli office into India's largest private-sector bank. After retiring he became a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group and, later, Deloitte India.

Where is Aditya Puri from?

He was born in 1950 in Gurdaspur district, Punjab, into a Punjabi family. His father was an Indian Air Force officer, so he grew up in many parts of India.

What is Aditya Puri's education?

He studied commerce (B.Com) at Panjab University, Chandigarh, and qualified as a Chartered Accountant after doing his articleship in Delhi.

How did Aditya Puri start HDFC Bank?

In 1994 Deepak Parekh of HDFC persuaded him to leave his job as CEO of Citibank Malaysia and take about half his salary to run HDFC's new bank. Puri asked for a free hand, hired a small team of mostly ex-Citibank and Bank of America bankers, and opened the first branch at Sandoz House, Worli, in early 1995.

What is Aditya Puri's net worth?

There is no reliable published net worth figure for Aditya Puri; he does not appear on the Hurun or Forbes rich lists. Exchange filings show he sold 74.2 lakh HDFC Bank shares for about Rs 843 crore (before cost and tax) in July 2020, and he was India's highest-paid bank CEO in several years.

What controversies was Aditya Puri involved in?

No regulator or court has found against Puri personally. During his tenure HDFC Bank faced RBI fines, including Rs 4.5 crore after the 2013 Cobrapost sting and Rs 10 crore in 2021 over GPS devices sold with car loans. A 2020 US class action that named him was dismissed in 2023.

Who succeeded Aditya Puri at HDFC Bank?

Sashidhar Jagdishan, a 25-year HDFC Bank veteran, succeeded Puri on 27 October 2020 with RBI approval. Anup Bagchi took over from Jagdishan as MD and CEO on 27 October 2026.

Why did Aditya Puri retire?

He retired on 26 October 2020 because the RBI caps the age of private bank CEOs at 70.

Aditya Puri: HDFC Bank CEO's Life Story

Key facts
Born	1950, Gurdaspur district, Punjab (exact date not publicly confirmed)
Family roots	Punjabi family; father an Indian Air Force officer
Education	B.Com, Panjab University, Chandigarh; Chartered Accountant
Family	Married to Anita “Smiley” Puri, author of the 2023 memoir Adityanama; two children
Company	HDFC Bank – founding MD & CEO, September 1994 to 26 October 2020; later senior adviser, Carlyle Group (Asia) and Deloitte India
Known for	Building HDFC Bank from a start-up into India’s largest private-sector bank, with consistently low bad loans

In early 1994 a phone rang in Kuala Lumpur. The man answering it was 43 and had what most Indian bankers of his generation would have called the perfect life. He was chief executive of Citibank Malaysia. He lived in a mansion on more than an acre of land, drove a Mercedes, and was one of the 50 Citi executives picked by chairman John Reed for a special grant of stock options [8][9][75].

The caller was Deepak Parekh of HDFC, the housing finance company. India had just opened banking to private players, and HDFC had applied for a licence. Parekh wanted Puri to come home and build the bank from nothing, for about half his Citibank salary [75][74].

Puri said yes. He had one condition. “I want complete freedom to run the bank,” he told Parekh. “No interference.” “You will get it,” Parekh replied [12].

Over the next 26 years, Aditya Puri turned that promise into the most consistent growth story in Indian banking. When he retired in October 2020, HDFC Bank had more than 5.6 crore customers, 5,326 branches and a net profit of over Rs 26,000 crore a year. It was the most valuable bank in the country and one of the few in the world worth more than US$100 billion [28][29][27]. This is the story of how a middle-class Air Force kid from Punjab built it, what went wrong along the way, and what he says he learned.

Where it began

Aditya Puri was born in 1950 in Gurdaspur district, Punjab, near the Pakistan border [7][79]. His exact date of birth is not confirmed in any reliable public record. What is certain is that he turned 70 in October 2020, which is why he had to retire [14].

His father was an officer in the Indian Air Force [8][9]. That meant transfers. Puri later described himself as “an Air Force kid” who grew up in almost every part of India and moved through a string of schools. It was a respectable, simple Punjabi household, but not a well-connected one. His father, he once said, knew no one who could help his son into a good civilian job [8].

One family story stayed with him for life. As a teenager, Puri grumbled to his mother that he had no “pull”, no contacts to open doors. She told him he could rely on the biggest pull of all: Uparwala, the one above. He took the lesson to mean that nobody would plan his career for him, so he had better plan it himself [8]. His grandfather gave him a similar push: “What you need to know first is what you really want from life” [9][10].

What he did not want was engineering. His father hoped he would study science. Puri, by his own account, was deliberately slack in high school so that the engineering route would close [8][10]. He went to Panjab University in Chandigarh for a Bachelor of Commerce and made the merit list [9][7]. Then he qualified as a Chartered Accountant, doing his articleship in Delhi [9][10].

Decades later, when he returned to Panjab University to speak to graduates, the students hung banners welcoming “the prodigal” home [68].

The first job and an important friendship

In 1975 Puri moved to Bombay to join Mahindra & Mahindra as an executive assistant to the finance director [10][74]. Tamal Bandyopadhyay’s history of HDFC Bank, A Bank for the Buck, describes him as a management trainee there, in his first job after graduation [12]. He lived as a paying guest in South Bombay and hated the long daily trip to the Mahindra office in Kandivali [10][75].

Those Bombay years gave him the friendship that would change his life. Through a social circle that played bridge together, he got to know Deepak Parekh, then a young finance professional who would go on to run HDFC. Parekh later joked to Bandyopadhyay: “As a young kid, Aditya used to fix our drinks and stand behind the bar” [12]. (You can read Parekh’s own story in our Deepak Parekh profile.)

The first break

Two decades at Citibank

Puri’s real education in banking came at Citibank. A cousin worked there, and Puri envied the perks [10]. He was hired by Nanoo Pamnani, who became his boss and mentor [10][11]. Sources do not give an exact joining year, but he spent close to two decades at Citi before 1994 [15][66].

The career path was classic Citi. Six months of training in Beirut. About a year in the loans department in Calcutta. Then marketing in Bombay as a relationship manager, and eventually head of wholesale banking for India [10][9]. He was posted abroad in Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong among other places; international profiles also list Greece, Korea, Taiwan and China [15][66][11].

Three habits from those years tell you a lot about the banker he would become.

First, he guarded his time. In Calcutta he told his boss he worked “until it’s dark”. The boss pointed out that in eastern India, winter evenings start early [8]. Puri set himself fixed office hours, roughly 8.30 am to 5.30 pm, and stuck to them for the rest of his life. “I didn’t want to make it at all if I had to sit late at work,” he said [9].

Second, he thought about money and freedom early. When Citi offered him a posting, he chose Saudi Arabia over New York because the 60% hardship allowance meant he could save his entire salary. “I figured I could save the money and become financially independent,” he said [8][9].

Third, he was willing to step down to step up. To move from operations into marketing, where the action was, he accepted a drop of a grade or two. “You make it up if you are competent,” he said [10][74].

In 1992 Citi sent him to Kuala Lumpur as chief executive of Citibank Malaysia [7][15]. His wife later wrote that he faced down staff demands there, telling employees they were free to resign and he would process the resignations promptly; they later threw him a farewell party [11]. He was, by any measure, a rising Citi star.

The call from Deepak Parekh

In 1993 the Reserve Bank of India issued guidelines allowing new private-sector banks for the first time in decades. HDFC was among the first to get in-principle approval [1][13]. Parekh needed someone to run the bank. In February 1994 he phoned Puri and then flew to Kuala Lumpur to make the pitch in person, offering him a meaningful stake in the new bank [13].

Puri has given several reasons for saying yes. One was family: “As the eldest son, I didn’t want to live with the guilt of enjoying the material comforts of a Citi job in Malaysia,” he told Business Standard [8]. Another was ambition. “I left Citibank because I didn’t want to remain an employee,” he said [14]. A third was the chance to build: “I was very clear that I wanted to build a world-class Indian bank” [9].

The price was steep. He took roughly half his Citibank pay and gave up the special Citi stock options [75][8]. The founding team made similar sacrifices. Many moved from Malabar Hill to Bandra and from Mercedes cars to Marutis, and all took around a 50% pay cut [74].

There was a fight over the name. Proposals included “Bank of Bombay” (rejected because Bank of Baroda was already “BoB”) and “Everest Bank of India”. Parekh worried that if the bank failed it would damage HDFC’s reputation. Puri insisted the bank carry the HDFC name. His wife’s memoir says he threatened to stay in Kuala Lumpur if he didn’t get his way [11][13]. He won.

Building the empire

The broken office at Sandoz House

HDFC Bank was incorporated in August 1994 and Puri took charge in September [1][7]. Its first office and branch were at Sandoz House in Worli, Mumbai. The bank received its licence in January 1995 and opened the branch in February [1].

The start was anything but glamorous. Puri remembered a “broken office” with broken chairs and half-finished furniture [17]. When the bank moved part of its operations to Kamala Mills, a then-rundown mill compound, there were rats. “We came back in the morning, the computers would not work as the damn rats had eaten up the cables,” he told shareholders at his last annual general meeting in 2020. “Initially we used to have our training centres under the trees” [17].

The founding team was small. Bandyopadhyay’s first book called it the “dirty dozen”; his second called it the “Lucky 13” [16][21]. They were mostly from Citibank and Bank of America, with a few from RBI and SBI. Names in the record include founding chairman S. S. Thakur, Vinod Yennemadi, Paresh Sukthankar, Luis Miranda, C. N. Ram, Samir Bhatia, A. Rajan, Harish Engineer and Bharat Shah [13][15][9]. Puri deliberately avoided hiring too many people from any one bank, so the new bank could build its own culture rather than copy Citi’s [21].

Puri described the team as “a bunch of us so-called kids who had grown up in middle-class backgrounds sharing a coke and wearing Bata shoes” [17]. Frugality was enforced: staff brought their own coffee mugs, and biscuits were banned at meetings [16]. When Finance Minister Manmohan Singh and RBI Governor C. Rangarajan visited, a demo ATM card in Singh’s name showed “insufficient funds”, and the machine later swallowed the managing director’s own card [16].

Not everyone took the newcomer seriously. Rivals called the bank a “flash in the pan”, and some investors could not even pronounce its name [78]. His wife recalls Puri asking her at night, “Smiley, have we made a mistake?” [78].

The IPO and the first profits

In March 1995 HDFC Bank raised Rs 50 crore through a public issue of 5 crore shares at Rs 10 each. It was oversubscribed 55 times. The stock listed on the BSE in May 1995 at Rs 39.95, a premium of about 300% [1]. Parekh later admitted: “We sold at par, ₹10. But I have no regrets” [12].

The numbers then started to climb. Net profit doubled from Rs 20.28 crore in 1995-96 to Rs 40.5 crore in 1996-97, and deposits rose from about Rs 686 crore to Rs 1,279 crore. The bank paid its first dividend, 8%, in 1997 [18][1].

The strategy: safe corporates first, then retail

HDFC Bank did not start by chasing ordinary customers. “Initially, we went in as a corporate bank for AAA-rated companies,” Puri told McKinsey [30]. Early clients included the Tata and Birla groups, Reliance, Siemens and Honda. From there the bank followed the money: it lent to the vendors who supplied those companies and the dealers who sold their products, and it ran salary accounts for their employees. Those salary accounts became the door into retail banking [30][15].

Two rules were set early. Credit decisions were separated from sales, so the people chasing business could not approve their own loans. And the bank would never “bet the bank”. “We never bet the bank till we completed pilot projects,” Puri said [74][30].

Technology was the other early bet. HDFC Bank insisted on a centralised computer system when most Indian banks still ran branches as islands. In 1999 it launched India’s first international debit card with Visa and real-time internet banking; in 2000 it launched SMS mobile banking [1][2]. In 2001 it became the first private bank allowed to collect income tax [1].

The Times Bank merger: India’s first friendly bank deal

In November 1999 HDFC Bank agreed to merge with Times Bank, promoted by the Times of India group’s Bennett, Coleman & Co. The swap ratio was one HDFC Bank share for every 5.75 Times Bank shares [19]. At that point HDFC Bank had 57 branches and Times Bank 35 [19]. The RBI approved the deal on 17 February 2000, and Times Bank ceased to exist on 26 February [20].

It was the first friendly merger in Indian banking and the first done entirely through a share swap. Between announcement and completion, HDFC Bank’s share price rose from Rs 98.90 to Rs 227.50 [21]. Puri later said the deal was “accretive from day one” [30]. The combined bank had 107 branches and about 1,800 staff [20].

In July 2001 HDFC Bank listed American Depositary Shares on the New York Stock Exchange, raising US$172.5 million [1][22].

The retail machine

Through the 2000s, HDFC Bank became a retail lender. It built a credit card business across more than 100 cities with a million users by 2004 [1]. By 2011 it led the market in auto loans, personal loans and credit cards [1]. By October 2014 it was India’s largest card issuer [1].

Puri managed this growth with unusual discipline. He set himself guardrails: a return on equity of 16-18%, a cost-to-income ratio at or below 35%, and gross bad loans at or below about 1.4% [30]. “You can price for risk up to a point, but not beyond that,” he said [30].

He also had a rule for constant reinvention: “We decided that, at any point, 25 percent of the bank’s business had to come from areas we weren’t already in” [32]. And he refused to treat lending as a favour for friends. He said friendship and banking are not related, and that well-connected borrowers who were bad risks got “nothing more than a coffee” [79]. HDFC Bank largely stayed out of the corporate lending excesses that later hurt many Indian banks.

Centurion Bank of Punjab: the big one

In February 2008 HDFC Bank’s board approved a merger with Centurion Bank of Punjab (CBoP), a bank that had itself been built by absorbing Bank of Punjab, Lord Krishna Bank and Bank Muscat’s India business [23][21]. The swap was one HDFC Bank share for 29 CBoP shares. Business Standard called it the largest merger in India’s financial sector at that time [23]. HDFC Bank valued the deal at Rs 9,510 crore (about US$2.4 billion), and it gave the bank 1,148 branches, the largest network in the private sector [1].

The market was sceptical at first: HDFC Bank’s shares fell 3.5% on the day [23]. Puri promised no lay-offs and a full integration within months [24].

Then came the 2008 global financial crisis. While foreign banks pulled back, HDFC Bank kept lending to small businesses. Puri said that within three years it was second only to SBI in lending to small and medium enterprises [30].

The 30% years

Between roughly 2004 and 2013, HDFC Bank reported more than 30% profit growth for 37 quarters in a row [26]. When growth slipped to 27% in late 2013, it was the first time in a decade it had fallen below 30% [26]. The first quarter of growth below 20% came only in the demonetisation quarter of late 2016 [77].

Profit rose from Rs 2,252 crore in 2008-09 to Rs 22,446 crore in 2018-19, about 10 times in a decade [71]. In November 2011 HDFC Bank’s market value briefly overtook State Bank of India’s for the first time, at about Rs 1.10 lakh crore; the two traded places for a few years afterwards [25]. In March 2019 HDFC Bank’s market value crossed US$100 billion, making it only the third Indian company to get there after Reliance Industries and TCS [27].

Rural India and digital

Puri pushed the bank into small towns earlier than most private rivals. “We went into semi-urban and rural India well before anybody else,” he said [30]. By 2020 more than half of HDFC Bank’s branches were outside the big cities, and a 2018 tie-up with government-run Common Service Centres aimed to reach about 2 lakh villages [59][1].

On digital, the bank ran a “Go Digital” campaign from late 2014 and launched the PayZapp wallet and “10-second” personal loans around 2015-16 (its own records give both years) [1][2]. Later came loans at ATMs, the EVA chatbot and video KYC [1][2].

Puri did not believe the hype around payment start-ups. In 2017, at a NASSCOM event, he said: “There is no money in the payments business… You can’t have a business that says ‘pay a Rs 500 bill and take Rs 250 cashback’” [54]. It was widely read as a dig at Paytm, the company built by Vijay Shekhar Sharma. By 2021 his tone on fintech in general had softened: “As far as fintech and banks are concerned, each will have niche markets, and each will have partnerships” [55]. But in 2022 he again questioned Paytm’s cashback-led model and its lack of profits [70].

The bank he left behind

For the year to March 2020, his last full year, HDFC Bank reported net profit of Rs 26,257 crore, up 24.6%, with gross bad loans of just 1.26% of advances [28]. It had more than 5.6 crore customers and about 1.17 lakh employees [29]. By June 2020 it had 5,326 branches and 14,996 ATMs in 2,825 cities [29].

McKinsey’s figures show HDFC Bank’s market value rising from about US$29 billion in 2010 to about US$107 billion in 2020 [31]. Its market value was reported in the range of Rs 5.5 lakh crore to Rs 7.6 lakh crore around his exit, depending on the date [59][14].

The awards followed. Barron’s put him on its list of the world’s top 30 CEOs, with Zee Business reporting in 2018 that he was the only Indian on it for three years running [62]. Fortune ranked him 18th on its Businessperson of the Year list in 2017 [61]. Euromoney gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020 [73].

How the wealth is held

Puri was a professional manager, not a promoter, so his wealth came from salary and employee stock options, not a founder’s stake. He was repeatedly India’s highest-paid bank CEO. In 2019-20 his pay was reported at Rs 18.92 crore, and he gained another Rs 161.56 crore that year by exercising stock options [33][34].

In July 2020, between 21 and 23 July, he sold 74.2 lakh HDFC Bank shares for about Rs 843 crore, cutting his holding to about 3.76 lakh shares, roughly 0.01% of the bank [34]. He had sold 12.5 lakh shares for about Rs 156 crore earlier that year [34]. The bank said the headline figure overstated what he gained, since the shares had been bought at different prices over the years and cost and tax had to be deducted [34].

There is no reliable published net worth figure for Puri, and he does not appear on the Hurun or Forbes rich lists. His own view of money: “Money has to be regarded as a collateral benefit and beyond a certain point, it is just a figure” [64].

The setbacks and failures

HDFC Bank’s story is often told as one smooth line upwards. It was not.

The slowdown that ended the streak. By 2014 the bank’s profit growth had fallen to around 21%, its lowest in more than a decade, and demonetisation pushed it to about 15% in one quarter of 2016-17 [26][77]. For a bank whose valuation rested on predictability, this was a real test. It kept growing, but the “30% every quarter” era was over.

Shedding jobs. Between September 2016 and March 2017 the bank’s headcount fell by about 10,700, from 95,002 to 84,325. The bank said digitisation meant it was not replacing people who left [65].

Losing his heir apparent. Paresh Sukthankar, deputy managing director and a founding team member, was widely seen as Puri’s natural successor. He resigned in August 2018, citing personal reasons. Puri called the exit “non-acrimonious and graceful” [67]. It forced the bank to run an open search for its next CEO.

Technology outages. For a bank that sold itself on technology, repeated outages hurt. A new mobile app had to be withdrawn in 2018 after login failures, and net and mobile banking went down for about two days in December 2019. The RBI sent a team to investigate [40]. These problems would come back to bite the bank weeks after Puri left (see below).

The vehicle-loan probe. In his final year, a whistleblower complaint about the auto-loan division turned into an internal investigation, staff dismissals and, later, an RBI penalty (details below). For a CEO who prided himself on clean lending, it was an awkward end.

Controversies and allegations

No court or regulator has made a finding against Aditya Puri personally. The matters below were actions against HDFC Bank as an institution during or just after his tenure, plus one US lawsuit that named him and was dismissed.

Cobrapost “Operation Red Spider” sting (2013)

Allegation: In March 2013 the news website Cobrapost released hidden-camera recordings in which, it said, staff at HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank offered ways to park unaccounted money, including through multiple accounts, insurance products and lockers [38][39].

Response: HDFC Bank said it was concerned and investigating. It hired Deloitte to carry out a forensic inquiry and the law firm Amarchand Mangaldas for a legal review [38].

What happened next:

In June 2013 the RBI fined HDFC Bank Rs 4.5 crore for lapses in know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering rules, such as selling gold coins for cash above Rs 50,000 and gaps in PAN/Form 60 records. It found “no prima facie evidence of money laundering” [39].
In January 2015 the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU-IND) fined the bank Rs 26 lakh for failing to report attempted suspicious transactions at branches visited by Cobrapost [6].

Status: Closed. Penalties were imposed on the bank; no finding of money laundering was made, and no action named Puri.

RBI fines for KYC and other lapses (2019-2020)

Allegation: The RBI fined HDFC Bank Rs 20 lakh in February 2019 for not complying with KYC/anti-money-laundering directions [4]; Rs 1 crore in June 2019 for KYC lapses and delayed fraud reporting linked to forged import documents used for foreign remittances [5]; and Rs 1 crore in January 2020 for failing to monitor 39 current accounts opened for IPO bidding [47].

Response: The bank paid the penalties. RBI orders state that such penalties are based on regulatory deficiencies and are not a judgement on the validity of customer transactions [4][5].

What happened next:

In 2020 the RBI also told HDFC Bank to return about Rs 210 crore it had debited from accounts of the troubled NBFC Altico Capital in 2019. Puri said the bank had acted “as per sound legal advice” but would comply [48].

Status: Closed. These were actions against the bank, not against Puri.

Vehicle-finance unit and GPS devices (2019-2021)

Allegation: In July 2020 Bloomberg reported that HDFC Bank had investigated improper lending practices and conflicts of interest in its vehicle-finance unit, which had a loan book of about Rs 1.2 lakh crore [35]. Further reports said GPS tracking devices costing about Rs 18,000-19,500 had been bundled into car loans between 2015 and 2019, allegedly without customers’ full knowledge, to help meet sales targets [36]. The unit’s long-time head had retired in March 2020; he declined to comment on the probe [35].

Response: At the July 2020 AGM, Puri said a whistleblower complaint triggered the inquiry, which found “personal misconduct exhibited by a set of individuals”, and that “appropriate action was taken” against employees in the auto-loan business [35]. At least six staff were reported to have been dismissed [36].

What happened next:

The RBI sought details of the probe [35].
In May 2021, after Puri’s retirement, the RBI fined HDFC Bank Rs 10 crore for marketing and selling third-party non-financial products in breach of the Banking Regulation Act, following a whistleblower complaint about the auto-loan portfolio [3].
In June 2021 the bank said it would refund GPS-device commissions to auto-loan customers for 2013-14 to 2019-20 [37].

Status: Closed. The bank paid the penalty and announced refunds. The conduct took place during Puri’s tenure; no finding was made against him personally.

US securities class action (2020-2023)

Allegation: In September 2020 US law firms filed securities class actions in a New York federal court against HDFC Bank, Aditya Puri, Sashidhar Jagdishan and the company secretary. They alleged that investors in the bank’s US-listed shares were misled about internal controls in vehicle lending [43].

Response: The defendants moved to dismiss the case [44].

What happened next:

In May 2023 the court granted the motion to dismiss with permission to amend; when no amended complaint was filed, the claims were dismissed with prejudice in June 2023, according to case trackers [44].

Status: Dismissed (2023). No finding against Puri.

SEBI and the BRH Wealth Kreators pledge (2019-2022)

Allegation: In January 2021 SEBI fined HDFC Bank Rs 1 crore, saying it had invoked shares pledged by the stockbroker BRH Wealth Kreators in October 2019, in breach of an interim SEBI order [45].

Response: The bank appealed to the Securities Appellate Tribunal [46].

Status: In February 2022 the tribunal quashed SEBI’s order, ruling that the bank was entitled to invoke the pledge [46]. Reports of a further appeal by SEBI could not be confirmed; no action named Puri.

The December 2020 RBI curbs on digital launches and credit cards

Allegation: After repeated outages, including in December 2019 and on 21 November 2020, the RBI ordered HDFC Bank on 2 December 2020 to temporarily stop all new digital launches and stop adding new credit card customers, and asked the board to fix accountability [41][40].

Response: The bank said it had been strengthening its IT systems and did not expect a material impact on its business. New CEO Sashidhar Jagdishan apologised to customers [41].

What happened next:

The RBI lifted the card curbs in August 2021 and the digital curbs in March 2022 [42].

Status: Closed. The order came about five weeks after Puri retired, but two of the outages it followed happened during his tenure.

Allegation: None. Puri’s sale of about Rs 843 crore of shares in July 2020 drew attention, and the stock fell about 3% on the news [34]. Commentators read it as a signal that he was preparing to step down.

Response: The bank said the amount overstated his gain once acquisition cost and tax were deducted [34].

Status: No regulator or court has alleged wrongdoing over the sale. It was disclosed to the stock exchanges as required.

As of 12 November 2026, no case or regulatory proceeding against Aditya Puri personally is pending in any public record we found.

Giving back

Puri’s own giving is private. There is no public report of a personal foundation or pledge. After retiring he said education and healthcare were areas he wanted to spend time on [59].

His public philanthropy record is through HDFC Bank. India’s CSR law came into force in April 2014, and under Puri the bank launched “Parivartan”, its umbrella programme for rural development, education, skilling, health and financial literacy. By his August 2020 letter to staff, Puri said Parivartan had touched 7.8 crore Indians and that the bank’s Sustainable Livelihood Initiative had helped lift 1.11 crore families out of poverty [29]. The bank has since kept scaling the programme: it spent Rs 1,068 crore on CSR in 2024-25, taking its cumulative CSR spending to Rs 6,176 crore by March 2025 [58].

Puri described CSR as “our paying our dues to society” [72]. In 2026, talking to students at IIM Bangalore alongside N. R. Narayana Murthy, he listed giving back as part of building a lasting company: “You need to create trust, salience, and give back to society” [56].

Succession

Puri thought about succession for years. “My successor was always in place, at least in my mind,” he said at his last AGM [76]. In November 2019 the board set up a search panel. The RBI approved Sashidhar Jagdishan, a 25-year HDFC Bank veteran who ran finance and strategy, as MD and CEO from 27 October 2020 [49]. Other names in the race included Kaizad Bharucha and Bhavesh Zaveri from inside the bank and Sunil Garg of Citi [49].

In an email to staff, Puri wrote that “in him you have the best person to lead, and I have the worthiest person to hand over the baton to” [50]. He had made Jagdishan the bank’s “change agent” about two years earlier, partly as a test: “The first step was to understand the talent available. To test whether the person would be able to deliver” [59].

Puri retired on 26 October 2020 on reaching 70, the RBI’s age limit for private bank CEOs [14][49]. He joked that the only change under Jagdishan would be the canteen menu, “from chicken tandoori to curd rice” [79]. When asked whether investors should worry about his exit, he replied: “The share price has gone up after my leaving. So, why are people worried about my leaving?” [59].

The bank he built has since changed shape. HDFC Ltd, the parent that founded it, merged into HDFC Bank on 1 July 2023, creating a lender with about 8.8 crore customers and a balance sheet of about Rs 32 lakh crore [21]. On 27 October 2026, Anup Bagchi succeeded Jagdishan as MD and CEO, the bank’s third chief in 32 years [60].

Life after HDFC Bank

Puri did not retire to the golf course for long, though golf and trekking are his passions [63]. In November 2020 the Carlyle Group named him senior adviser for Asia, helping it source deals and mentor portfolio companies [51]. In January 2021 he joined the Strides group as an adviser and later became chairperson of its biotech associate Stelis Biopharma [52]. In October 2023 he became a senior adviser to Deloitte India [53].

He still speaks occasionally. In early 2026 he gave a long interview to McKinsey [32], shared a stage with Narayana Murthy at IIM Bangalore [56], and warned against hype about artificial intelligence: “There is too much hype on AI and what it can do and how quickly it can do it. Will some jobs be lost? Yes. Will new jobs be created? Yes” [57].

His wife Anita, known as Smiley, published a memoir about him, Adityanama, in 2023 [11][68].

What their journey teaches

Give up the comfortable job only for a real seat at the table. Puri took half his salary, but he asked for, and got, complete freedom to run the bank [12]. Ownership of decisions, not the pay cheque, was the trade he made.

Boring discipline compounds. His guardrails, 16-18% return on equity, cost-to-income near 35% and gross bad loans around 1.4%, were not exciting [30]. But holding them for 26 years produced 37 straight quarters of 30%+ profit growth and very low bad loans [26][28].

Grow next to what you already have. HDFC Bank went from AAA companies to their suppliers, dealers and employees, then to retail, then to small towns [30]. Each step used relationships the bank already had. Even so, Puri wanted a quarter of the business to come from areas the bank was not yet in [32].

Protect your time to protect your judgement. He left the office at 5.30 pm, took no files home and rarely carried a phone [8][14][69]. The point was not leisure. He believed a CEO’s job is to think, and “giving ideas is my job; there are better people to execute it” [8].

Say no to friends. Refusing loans to well-connected but risky borrowers kept the bank out of the corporate bad-loan crisis that hurt many Indian banks after 2015 [79].

Build an institution that does not need you. “Your real success is to leave behind an organization that functions without you,” Puri said [30]. Despite the early loss of his likely heir, the bank has now had two planned CEO handovers [49][60]. Still, the vehicle-loan probe and outages show that even the best-run systems need constant checking.

For more stories on India’s banks and markets, see CapitalVia Insights. You may also like our profiles of Uday Kotak and Nandan Nilekani.

A profile for general reading, based on public records and reporting as of 12 November 2026. Not investment, tax or legal advice.

Aditya Puri: HDFC Bank CEO's Life Story

Where it began

The first job and an important friendship

The first break

Two decades at Citibank

The call from Deepak Parekh

Building the empire

The broken office at Sandoz House

The IPO and the first profits

The strategy: safe corporates first, then retail

The Times Bank merger: India’s first friendly bank deal

The retail machine

Centurion Bank of Punjab: the big one

The 30% years

Rural India and digital

The bank he left behind

How the wealth is held

The setbacks and failures

Controversies and allegations

Cobrapost “Operation Red Spider” sting (2013)

RBI fines for KYC and other lapses (2019-2020)

Vehicle-finance unit and GPS devices (2019-2021)

US securities class action (2020-2023)

SEBI and the BRH Wealth Kreators pledge (2019-2022)

The December 2020 RBI curbs on digital launches and credit cards

Giving back

Succession

Life after HDFC Bank

What their journey teaches

Sources (79)

Frequently asked questions

More stories

Where it began

The first job and an important friendship

The first break

Two decades at Citibank

The call from Deepak Parekh

Building the empire

The broken office at Sandoz House

The IPO and the first profits

The strategy: safe corporates first, then retail

The Times Bank merger: India’s first friendly bank deal

The retail machine

Centurion Bank of Punjab: the big one

The 30% years

Rural India and digital

The bank he left behind

How the wealth is held

The setbacks and failures

Controversies and allegations

Cobrapost “Operation Red Spider” sting (2013)

RBI fines for KYC and other lapses (2019-2020)

Vehicle-finance unit and GPS devices (2019-2021)

US securities class action (2020-2023)

SEBI and the BRH Wealth Kreators pledge (2019-2022)

The December 2020 RBI curbs on digital launches and credit cards

The July 2020 share sale

Giving back

Succession

Life after HDFC Bank

What their journey teaches

Sources (79)

Frequently asked questions

More stories