Little more than a decade ago, the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI) was a vulnerable institution whose primary purpose was to provide industrial loans to support India’s economic development. Today, with assets around $56 billion, ICICI Bank is the country’s largest private bank, with a vast consumer base served from more than 614 branches and 2,200 ATMs in 13 countries. K. V. Kamath, who became managing director and CEO in 1996, attributes the bank’s success largely to innovations in its use of technology. Borrowing from Silicon Valley, Kamath has encouraged the rapid development and implementation of technologies that enable ICICI to serve vast numbers of customers. He also has begun exploring ways to serve the “unbanked,” the lowest-income groups, which constitute much of the emerging market’s population.

With an aggressive strategy that some observers see as bordering on audacity, the bank has moved confidently and rapidly to integrate changes in the way it serves customers (ramping up its reliance on ATM and Internet usage) and runs its back-office operations (with inexpensive software development and hardware), all while keeping technology costs at a fraction of those at other large banks. Kamath views IT as so critical to the...