ICICI Bank India is the largest private bank in India and the second largest in the entire banking sector (consisting of banks belonging to both public and private sector). Only State Bank of India (SBI), controlled entirely by the Government of India has a bigger business than ICICI Bank.
About ICICI Bank India
Founded in 1955 as Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India, ICICI Limited was established by the Government of India in the 1960s as a Financial Institution like Industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI) to finance large industrial projects.
ICICI then, was not a bank and hence could not take retail deposits and was not required to comply with Indian banking requirements for liquid reserves. ICICI borrowed funds from various agencies like the World Bank, often at concessional rates. These funds were deployed in large corporate loans. However, the scenario changed drastically in1990s when ICICI founded a separate legal entity and named it "ICICI Bank".ICICI Bank,as the name would suggest, undertook normal banking operations like accepting deposits,issuing credit cards, providing car loans etc. The experiment was so successful that ICICI merged into ICICI Bank and this "reverse merger" happened in 2002.
