Zarin Daruwala faces multiple challenges in her new role as CEO of StanChart India

Fifty-year-old Zarin Daruwala has joined the list of dozens of ICICI bankers who are heading many of the financial services ventures. Be it Goldman's Sonjoy Chaterjee and JP Morgan's Kalpana Morparia or Axis Bank's Shikha Sharma, these professionals nurtured by K.V. Kamath have already proved their mantle outside.

Daruwala is joining Standard Chartered India as its CEO at a time when the bank is facing many challenges both globally and also in the Indian unit.

Daruwala's forte is corporate banking. She got the corporate banking portfolio in the late 1990s in the ICICI Bank. In 2002, she was shifted to rural, which was actually a short stint as by 2005, she was handed back the corporate portfolio. And that was a booming period both for corporate as well as retail.

"At the end of the day, the client should respect you," said Daruwala to Business Today a few years ago.

But Daruwala's ride hasn't been smooth since 2008 when the stress in the corporate sector started to impact the private bank's portfolio. While the bank's retail advances revived by growing at 20 per cent-plus, the corporate advances' growth was in single digit last year. The widespread stress in the industry also started showing up in the asset quality. The private bank's NPAs have jumped from 0.82 per cent to 1.40 per cent in March 2015. The stress in the asset quality still persists.

For Daruwala, the assignment at UK-based Standard Chartered Bank's Indian unit brings a much larger canvas from retail banking, corporate banking to investment banking. Many say while the StanChart assignment will be a complete change in terms of the surrounding, people system, and processes, the banking business, however, is not in the best of health.

The parent bank has been facing headwinds in its market in the UK and Asian region. Early this year, Chairman Peter Sands and Jaspal Bindra, who were the face of the bank, made an exit because shareholders were not happy with the performance.

Sunil Kaushal, who was dispatched from Taiwan to head the Indian operations in February 2012, also faced challenging times in India because of slowdown in the domestic economy.

The profits of the Indian unit are almost flat in the past three years. There is also not much improvement in the balance sheet size at Rs 1,31,739 crore. According to available figures, the bank has been facing severe pressure on its infrastructure and industry portfolio.

Take, for example, the fact that gross NPAs in infrastructure sector are highest at over 31 per cent as compared to the advances to infrastructure portfolio. In fact, the bank has a huge exposure to Essar Group, which is also a big pain area as things aren't improving in the economy.

While the scale in StanChart India is much, small smaller than ICICI bank, whose balance sheet is almost four to five times the foreign bank, there are challenges awaiting Daruwala in the new assignment.

She hasn't done retail banking in her life. StanChart, with over 100 branches covering four dozen cities, has one of the largest branches franchise amongst the foreign banks. In fact, retail banking has been one of the pain areas for foreign banks because of its initial focus on unsecured loans like credit card and personal loans. Zarin, who comes with a two and a half decades of banking experience, will have to devise a strategy to make it a profitable proposition.

Similarly, she has her task cut out in corporate banking where she not only has to put a check on asset quality deterioration, but also scale up loan growth.