It was hell, he says. In IIM Ahmedabad, everybody is a topper and faculty members crush you into pieces to build you mentally. For instance, a statistics professor set a four-hour test in which the students could refer to any text books in the library. After four hours, we couldnt attempt even 20% of the questions, says Brijesh Mehra, IIM Ahmedabad alumnus who is the new India Chief of RBS Brijesh Mehra credits his time at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A) with instilling in him the qualities that have stood him in good stead, especially patience and mental resilience. And earlier on, chewing gum played a role in teaching him about how to build relationships. The new India head of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), the go-to man for Indian blue-chip companies looking to raise debt, has reached the top after having started as a management trainee at ANZ Grindlays Bank in 1983. Mehra replaced Meera Sanyal, who left the bank to join politics and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). He had a tough time at IIM, says the 50-year-old Mehra, because his classmates were all rank holders, whereas he was a mere commerce graduate from Delhi University by his account. He mentions that the pressure at IIM Ahmedabad was such that he used to wonder what he was doing at business school. But the grueling experience taught him to be calm and to be in control of his emotions, virtues that have rewarded him well during a career working in every department of the banking business and building relationships with clients. Mehras IIM batch incidentally was a year senior to that of Raghuram Rajan, now the Reserve Bank of India governor. The son of former Indian Air Force chief SK Mehra would go on to become one of Indias star bankers. Hes raised about $38 billion from overseas banks and investors through bond sales in the past five years for companies such as Hindalco, Vedanta Resources and many state-owned oil refiners. He is truly a relationship banker than a transaction-led one, says S Talukdar, former chief financial officer, Hindalco, with whom Mehra worked closely to finance the purchase of Canadian aluminium company Novelis for $6 billion in 2006. RBS was the only bank that advised on Hindalcos fund-raising through equity and debt for the acquisition. Mehra invests a lot of time to understand the business strategy of a company and provides tailor-made financial solutions, says Talukdar. He also advised the Aditya Birla group company on raising $5-billion debt to expand capacity in India, besides leading the syndicate of lenders that helped Vedanta finance the purchase of Cairn India for $9 billion. Mehra has many firsts to his credit, including setting up structured finance at ABN Amro (later purchased by RBS), offering the first letter of credit of Rs 150 crore to a public sector company, Coal India, while he was ABN Amro branch manager in Kolkata. That relationship would expand manifold when he advised Indias largest coal miner on raising money from the overseas market. A few months ago, RBS advised stateowned refiners on raising money from Japanese banks. All this has meant that RBS, despite not having M&A and equity capital market divisions, has been among the top three in the deals league table for raising money through bonds for Indian companies for the past three calendar years. His colleagues vouch for his patience and his ability to think out of the box. If I am working on a transaction with a client and if there are some structuring issues, I can fall back on him for a free-wheeling discussion to create a product which makes sense to the client, says Manmohan Singh, managing director and head of debt capital market, India and Southeast Asia, RBS. Singh has a dotted reporting line to Mehra as country head. So, where does the chewing gum come in? Mehra went to school in the erstwhile USSR when his father was posted as a defence attache in that country. He was able to make friends because he was able to offer his classmates chewing gum, then hard to come by in the Soviet Union. Mehras underlying philosophy is simple and the key to his success: Client is always king... Supporting a client in difficult times is the key. - Reference: The Economic Times
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 11:23:25 +0000
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