No sustainable business in an unsustainable business: Ashish Agarwal, YES Bank

Businesses are changing today and that there cannot be any sustainable business in an unsustainable world, said Ashish Agarwal, senior group president and chief risk officer of Yes Bank in his opening address.

Agarwal said that theme for The Economic Times Global Business Summit – ‘Social, Sustainable and Scalable,’ cannot be any more relevant and that the 3S are highly interlinked and synergistic. He further noted that the challenge is to find a way to expedite action on the 3S.

“One thing we can do is to learn from experts as we discuss policy ideas and best practices to address this issue of 3S,” he said


Agarwal observed that in a world where one can scale rapidly without adding to many jobs, is one of the major challenges. “It is a challenge on how to deal with the social consequence of this,” he said.

“For businesses going forward their ability to aggregate and harness all kind of data will determine the difference between life and death,” he added.

Agarwal said that banks also need to make the shift towards platform companies and learn to work through partners and that YES Bank already works on alliances and relationships built through technology platforms where banking is a platform solution embedded into the lives of customers through partners across sectors.

“Let say a resounding yes to building scalable and sociable businesses which are also sustainable,” he added.