idfc has come a long way from being a termlending institution focused on infrastructure when it was set up in 1997 to get a licence to become a fullfledged bank idfc executive chairman rajiv lall who joined the financial institution in 2005 amid a controversy speaks to toi about the challenges in transforming into a bank excerptsare you all set to start your banking foray is the blueprint ready there is a lot of work that needs to be done we have to work towards diversifying our geographical footprint the assets and liabilities and the spread we are working on that and we will look at corporate rural agriculture retail and smesthere have been two instances of financial institutions icici and idbi turning universal banks of which one has been successful and the other not so successful isnt it going to be a big challenge for you there are some aspects which are very easy and some which are not so easy the easy bit is that we dont have a large network we dont have an overpriced workforce we dont have a technology system that we are tied to and we have deep pockets so these are starting advantages they give us flexibility of operations and will help us build in a differentiated way the tough part is that these are all things that can be looked at from the other side having a good branch network requires a lot of hard work there is a big hr challenge as we have to recruit at a scale that is significantly greater than what we have done in the past then there are regulatory obligations that we have to comply withhow will you differentiate yourself given that there is a set of public sector banks which have the same focus and then there are the new generation banks which offer very similar services being a new new generation bank hopefully we will start a new trend that will emerge over time a lot has changed in the last 10 years when the last round of bank licences were issued first on the regulatory front pricing of deposits has been liberalized that can help us compete on deposits two there are regulatory changes that facilitate operations through banking correspondents and whitelabel atms three it is easier to deploy technology now the cost of handheld devices has come down and rural telephony penetration has increased significantlywill you follow an icici bank kind of a model and scale up your operations at a brisk pace we are not running a sprint its a marathon the first three years are all about investment and experimentation the next three are about consolidation and it is only after that you think about rapid growth and scaleup we have to move in a calibrated fashiondo you have a term lendingretail mix in mind after the first fivesix years currently all that we do is term lending the first part of the transformation will be to supplement term