Vol. 6, Issue 4, Part E (2020)

Abstract
India’s commercial banks, be they public players or private players, embraced information and communications technology (ICT) for their operations over two decades ago. Twenty years is good enough to judge whether the said players reaped the benefits of their investment in ICT. Hence the researcher sought to verify whether the players had reaped a rich harvest from their investment in ICT. The researcher restricted himself to two leading private sector players, namely, ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank in pursuit of the verification since the two embraced ICT almost at the same time. The researcher considered three metrics for the purpose, namely, employee cost, net profit, and reserves or retained earnings. The findings revealed that the level of performance of the two banks in the post-ICT phase had been the same, by and large. However, the ICICI Bank did not clock a secular rise in the net profit growth space. Its performance in the net profit growth space and the reserves growth space was characterised by a fits-and-starts pattern. The silver lining is that in the reserves space, the bank’s growth stabilised from FY 2012 onwards and hopefully, the trend will be sustained. In the case of HDFC Bank, a secular rise was witnessed in the net profit growth space. Further, no fits-and-starts trend was discernible in the growth of net profit. The growth in the net profit space was consistently incremental. But in the reserves space, the growth was erratic and moved in fits-and-starts. Investment in ICT is not the be-all and end-all of banking. It should be supplemented by strategic tools. Only then the banks will have benefited from their investment in ICT.