Our Competitive Strengths
We attribute our growth and continuing success to the following competitive strengths:
We have a strong brand and extensive reach through a large distribution network
At HDFC Bank, we are focused on understanding our customers’ financial needs and providing them with relevant banking solutions. We are driven by our core values—customer focus, operational excellence, product leadership, sustainability and people. This has helped us grow and achieve our status as one of the largest private sector banks in India, while delivering value to our customers, stakeholders, employees and our community. HDFC Bank is one of the most trusted and preferred bank brands in India. We have been acknowledged as “India’s Most Valuable Brand” by BrandZ for the fourth consecutive year and were named the Best Domestic Bank—India by the Asiamoney India Banking Awards in 2017. We have capitalized on our strong brand by establishing an extensive branch network throughout India serving a broad range of customers in urban, semi-urban and rural regions. As of March 31, 2018, we had 4,787 branches and 12,635 ATMs in 2,691 cities and towns and over 43.6 million customers, and of our total branches, 53% were in the semi-urban and rural areas. Our branch network is further complemented by our digital strategy, including online and mobile banking solutions, to provide our customers with access toon-demand banking services, which we believe allows us to develop strong and loyal relationships with our customers. We are leveraging new technology to offer all banking solutions through the digital platform, which can be accessed by customers across devices of their choice.
We provide a wide range of products and high quality service to our clients in order to meet their banking needs
Whether in retail banking, wholesale banking or treasury operations, we consider ourselves a“one-stop shop” for our customers’ banking needs. We consider our high quality service offerings to be a vital component of our business and believe in pursuing excellence in execution through multiple internal initiatives focused on continuous improvement. This pursuit of high quality service and operational execution directly supports our ability to offer a wide range of banking products.
Our retail banking products include deposit products, retail loans (such as vehicle and personal loans), and other products and services, such as private banking, depositary accounts, brokerage services, foreign exchange services, distribution of third party products (such as insurance and mutual funds), bill payments and sales of gold and silver bullion. In addition, we are the largest credit card issuer in India with 10.7 million cards outstanding as of March 31, 2018, and the second largest card issuer (across both debit and credit cards) amongst private sector banks in India, with 35.0 million total cards outstanding as of March 31, 2018. On the wholesale banking side, we offer customers working capital loans, term loans, bill collections, letters of credit, guarantees, foreign exchange and derivative products and investment banking services. We also offer a range of deposit and transaction banking services such as cash management, custodial and clearing bank services and correspondent banking. We believe our large scale and low cost of funding enable us to pursue high-quality wholesale financing opportunities competitively and at an advantage compared to our peers. We collect taxes for the Government and are bankers to companies in respect of issuances of equity shares and bonds to the public. Ournon-banking financial company (“NBFC”) subsidiary HDB Financial Services Limited (“HDBFSL”) offers loan and asset finance products including tractor loans, consumer loans and gold loans, as well as business process outsourcing solutions such as forms processing, documents verification and back-office services.
We are able to provide this wide range of products across our branch network, meaning we can provide our targeted rural customers with banking products and services similar to those provided to our urban customers, which we believe gives us a competitive advantage. Our wide range of products and focus on superior service and execution also create multiple cross-selling opportunities for us and, we believe, promote customer retention.
We have achieved robust and consistent financial performance while maintaining a healthy asset quality during our growth
On account of our superior operational execution, broad range of products, expansion in our geographical reach and the resulting increase in market penetration through our extensive branch network, our assets have
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