Syndicate, the lender whose chairman was arrested in 2014, had a ramshackle outlet just next to my office in southern Mumbai, with an ATM I used to use from time to time. The bank’s orange logo featured an Alsatian dog and the slogan ‘faithful and friendly’. Inside it was all shabby furniture, piles of yellowing paper and slow-moving clerks. The single cash machine normally did not work. Barely half of Indians had bank accounts, but those that did mostly used branches like this, attracted by their safe and sober reputations.
