Private Sector Banks in India—A SWOT Analysis

The financial reforms launched during the early 1990s have dramatically changed the banking scenario in the country. New prudential norms, such as capital adequacy prescriptions, identification of bad debts, provision requirements, etc., were enforced; and interest rates were deregulated. As a sequel to these reforms, new private sector banks were allowed entry into the market. Many of these new private sector banks have brought with them state-of-art technology for business processing and service delivery, besides being efficient in catering to the customers demands. Yet, the failure of Global Trust Bank made Indian depositors to question the sustainability of private banks. Against this backdrop, this article attempts to undertake SWOT analysis and other appropriate statistical techniques, to rank 30 private sector banks from the financial data collected for the three years—2002, 2003 and 2004. The study has, using four parameters—efficiency, financial strength, profitability, and size and scale, ranked the banks independently for each year.