Aditya Puri

Some Lesser Known Facts About Aditya Puri

• Aditya Puri is the Managing Director of HDFC Bank, India’s largest private sector bank. He is also the longest-serving head of any private bank in India.

• Aditya Puri holds more than four decades of experience in the banking sector, both in India and other countries.
  

• Aditya Puri started his career as a management trainee with Mahindra Ltd in Mumbai. While working there, he lived as a paying guest and used to pay a rent of Rs. 300 per month. He used to get a half cup of tea in the morning and travelled from his PG to Kandivali for work.

• While working in Mumbai, he realised that he had not come to Mumbai to live a life like that. He asked his cousin (who was working at Citibank in Beirut, Lebanon) to fix his interview at Citibank. He was interviewed and was selected for the job at Citibank.

• He worked with Citibank for 21 years during which he worked in 19 countries.

• In 1992, he became the CEO of Citibank in Malaysia. While in Malaysia, Deepak Parekh, who was running HDFC’s housing company, contacted him and invited him to set up a bank in India. He returned to India as a managing director of the HDFC Bank in 1994. The bank opened with its first office at Sandoz House in Worli and was inaugurated by the then Finance Minister of India, Manmohan Singh. 

• During his tenure as the MD of the HDFC Bank, Aditya led two major mergers in the banking industry of India, i.e., the merger of Times Bank, and Centurion Bank of Punjab with the HDFC Bank.

• Aditya and Deepak Parekh are very close friends since their college days. 

• Puri doesn’t wear a watch, doesn’t carry a mobile phone, and doesn’t uses his mobile phone either.

• His tenure as the MD of the HDFC bank is slated to end on 26 October 2020.

• His wife, Anita and daughter, Amrita have a clothing line called ‘Akuri,’ which includes different styles of Indian ethnic styles, dresses and tops.