Deepak Satwalekar relishes his association with the HDFC brand
In his role as managing director & CEO of HDFC Standard Life, Deepak Satwalekar built an insurance company that is trusted and seen as an ethical player. Having turned 60, he has retired and now wants to focus on social causes close to his heart.
There are other things I have to do. It is not that I did not want to continue to be in insurance. I want to do something else; give back to society whatever I received. I believe education is important, so I am taking some initiatives on primary education and employment opportunities in rural areas. I want to do it even while I have the energy. I was able to convince one man (Deepak Parekh, chairman, HDFC) to give me a job and I didn’t want to test myself again. They used to say HDFC is a private sector company with public sector salaries. But there are a whole lot of people out here who have stayed for long. We had a value system given to us by the founder and continued to work on those principles.There is no shortcut available in life. Don’t do anything that will come back and haunt you. That was the driving principle. If you are giving a 30-year mortgage, you can’t take a view based on the next one year. We used to take asset liability match very seriously. At no point was asset liability mismatch more than a fraction of a year. We used to give 15-20 year loans. It was based on the mentality of the Indian middle class. They would come and prepay the loans. The average loan never used to go beyond seven years. We used to have a mix of deposits and long-term loans. Never a bigger mismatch. You don’t get a big spread when you have a perfect match, but you get to sleep at nights.