Interviews

Naina Lal Kidwai is a prominent investment and retail banker in India. She is the recipient of the 2022 Alumni Achievement Award, the highest honor an HBS graduate can receive in acknowledgement of their impact on both business and society. In this interview, she discusses the challenges she faced as a woman trying to start a career in chartered accountancy in India right out of college, and then moves on to her experience as the first Indian woman to go to Harvard Business School. Upon graduating from the Harvard Business School in 1982, she began a career in investment banking at British-owned Grindlays Bank in India (acquired by ANZ in 1984), which she joined that same year. Kidwai discusses the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s, the evolution of capital markets in that country, and the emergence of the National Stock Exchange. Kidwai then moves on to discuss her switch from investment banking to retail banking, where she became head of Non-Resident Indian Services. She stayed at Grindlays for 12 years before moving to Morgan Stanley, where she went back to working with capital markets in equity, debt, mergers, and acquisitions. After Morgan Stanley’s, she moved to the Indian affiliate of HSBC to head their investment banking and capital markets business, eventually becoming Country Head and Group General Manager of HSBC India until 2009. In her interview, Kidwai explains how technology such as the internet, mobile phones, and mobile banking were able to help ease the pain of the Modi governments’s demonetization strategy in 2016, which created a lengthy period of cash shortages. Kidwai further touches on India’s microfinance movement and the differences between the corporate world and the not-for-profit world. Towards the end of the interview, Naina Lal Kidwai discusses the India Sanitation Coalition (ISC), an NGO, which she established in 2015. The ISC focuses on water, sanitation, and hygiene with an emphasis on projects such as behavioral change to promote clean habits, starting with educating schoolchildren about safe sanitation and hygiene practices. She explains how the ISC is able to get corporates and the private sector involved in these projects and contribute to the overall task of improving sanitation in India.

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