Narayanan Kamakodi
has been an obedient son, a modern-day Casabianca. Be it choosing his higher education or abandoning the BPO venture with his brother or joining
City Union Bank
, Kamakodi has followed the advice of his father
V Narayanan
, who was CUB chairman. “I am probably the last man of my generation who never questioned his dad,” says the CEO and managing director of CUB.
Born in
Thippirajapuram
near Kumbakonam, Kamakodi is the younger of the two siblings who went to a panchayat union school and later to a town higher secondary school in Kumbakonam which produced the mathematical wizard Ramanujan. “I wasn’t bad with numbers,” he says, recalling his early school days and the Tamil lessons he learned.
He later joined Annamalai University and moved to REC Trichy in the second year to complete his graduation in chemical engineering in 1995. “It was a proud moment when I got a campus placement offer from Reliance Industries as planning engineer for their PTA plant in Surat,” he says. After three years with Reliance, Kamakodi decided to get some management education.
“Dad opposed my idea of going to the US to study. Dad told me the west would spoil me with their way of life. He said if I still go to the US, it must be to the White House,” says the 47-year-old. So, even after scoring high in GMAT, Kamakodi applied to three Asian universities, and got it in all the three. He chose a Chinese University in Hong Kong for an MBA. As destiny would have it, Kamakodi’s award winning business plan paper at the Chinese University took him to the US and earned him a dinner with former US president
George H W Bush
. “Here too I was true to Dad’s commandment,” he quips.
Kamakodi joined his brother in a BPO business. “It was way ahead of its time and did not proceed as planned,” he says. And then came his dad’s order: “Come and join the bank, but on merit.”
He applied and was called for an interview at CUB in 2003. “It was a gruelling interview by four directors and finally they selected me as DGM planning & HRD,” he said. The Board thought it had found a successor to N a r ay a n a n and also someone who would steer the bank with some new-age business ideas.
The board was not amused when he made a presentation that the bank should not expand into consortium banking, instead it should dive into SME lending, its core strength. “To me that was a crucial decision. It did not meet the risk appetite of the bank,” he said.
And other regional lenders who took the big plunge into consortium banking, including Karur headquartered Lakshmi Vilas Bank went belly up and had to be bailed out by Singapore’s DBS Bank.
CUB’s journey wasn’t without ups and downs, but it never missed a dividend; it has remained profitable every year for the past 118 years. Kamakodi has quietly worked his charm with the bank’s investors. During the past decade, the bank’s branches proliferated from 222 to 700, profits rose from Rs 153 crore to Rs 476 crore, and its intrinsic value per share rose from Rs 20.64 to Rs 79.08.
Kamakodi is now ready with the next big growth story. “We know that branch banking will drop, but will never become zero. So we have shrunk the size of the branches and tutored all our staff to get as personal as possible. Incremental business from here on should outsmart what we did in the past 15 years,” he says.
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