How Indian bank IndusInd's push for profits and lax controls drove it to a crisis

MUMBAI (Reuters) - IndusInd Bank ignored established Indian derivative accounting practices for years as it chased profit growth, resulting in a $175 million balance-sheet hole and the biggest crisis for the lender in its three-decade history, multiple sources said.

Still, the 2.35% shortfall in the net worth of India's fifth-biggest private sector lender may not have come to light last month had the rupee not sharply slumped recently, said the sources.

IndusInd disclosed in March accounting discrepancies in its derivatives portfolio whose impact roughly equated to an entire quarter's profits and sparked the loss of about one-fourth of its market value.

In the aftermath, the country's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), has asked the CEO of the bank and his deputy to step down as soon as replacements are found and approved by it, Reuters reported last month, citing sources. IndusInd has denied any such push from the RBI.

While India is not new to crises at banks, the IndusInd debacle underscores the risks to them from complex derivative transactions and to the financial system from sudden and sharp moves in the currency, while also raising questions about the robustness of bank board controls.

Reuters pieced together the sequence of events that led to IndusInd's crisis by speaking to more than a dozen people, most of whom had direct knowledge of the matter or were aware of the RBI's thinking.

At the heart of the controversy is the bank's long-term foreign currency deposits, which include funds denominated in U.S. dollars and the Japanese yen. IndusInd's long-term foreign borrowings stood at 28% of its total borrowings of 500.87 billion rupees ($5.9 billion) as of end-December.

The bank converted these foreign currency deposits into rupees to fund its loan growth in a highly competitive Indian banking sector, managing the interest rate and currency risks through hedging, said the sources.

But while its rivals also sought foreign currency deposits to fund loan growth, IndusInd's different accounting treatment of the hedging transactions inflated its income and hid its losses, said the sources.

IndusInd, whose largest shareholder is the UK-based billionaire Hinduja family, did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

MARKED-TO-MARKET

Over the last five to seven years, the bank's asset-liability desk hedged the foreign currency deposits that it swapped into rupees internally with the treasury desk to mitigate the interest rate risk, while the latter hedged the foreign currency risk with an external counterparty, several sources said.

The external trades were marked-to-market, meaning they reflected real-time market movements and were mostly profitable for the bank, adding to its trading gains, multiple sources said.

But the internal trades were not being marked-to-market and that caused losses to remain concealed and not be reflected on the bank's profit and loss statement until matters came to a head in March, said four sources.

The derivative accounting practices escaped regulatory checks as the complexities of the trades and the valuation models made it difficult for regulators and the lender's auditors to detect these lapses, three of the sources said.

IndusInd's statutory auditors for those years, MSKA and Associates and M.P. Chitale and Co, did not respond to requests for comment.

Things began to change after the RBI barred inter-departmental derivatives trading at banks from April 1 last year. It did not give a reason for the change in the rules.

But by then, the size of the positions at IndusInd without adequate mark-to-market had ballooned and those had to be unwound, one of the sources said.

In September 2024, the bank's then chief financial officer, Gobind Jain, approached CEO Sumant Kathpalia to flag "suspicious transactions" in the derivative trades, according to two of the sources.

Jain told Kathpalia that the transactions did not meet the new accounting guidelines laid out by the RBI and that all these internal trades should be unwound, said the two sources. Jain also suggested appointing an external agency to unearth the discrepancies in transactions, they added.

Soon after that, the bank approached the RBI to notify it of the discrepancies and was verbally told to hire an external auditor, a source aware of the central bank's thinking said. The RBI did not respond to a Reuters email seeking comment.

RUPEE FALL STINGS

IndusInd's management appointed global audit firm PwC to conduct a probe into possible accounting lapses, which started in December, added the source. However, no public disclosures about the discrepancies or the probe were made at that time.

A sharp fall in the rupee since then, as a result of a spike in global markets volatility induced by U.S. President Donald Trump's trade war, made the financial hit to the balance sheet untenable and eventually led to the bank's disclosure, three of the sources said.

Between September and February, the rupee slumped 4.2% against the dollar and 1.6% against the yen.

That compounded the mark-to-market losses as the bank had to repurchase the foreign currency at much higher rates than it had anticipated, the three sources said.

IndusInd is not under threat of a collapse, with the RBI saying last month the financial position of the bank remains satisfactory and that it is well-capitalised. And the Hinduja family has said it stands ready to infuse capital into the bank.

But investigations into the accounting lapses at IndusInd have now been widened, with accounting and consulting firm Grant Thornton doing a wider audit, including to determine whether there was fraud or intentional misstatement of accounts.

($1 = 85.2030 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Siddhi Nayak and Swati Bhat in Mumbai; Editing by Sumeet Chatterjee and Muralikumar Anantharaman)