I’m running a quick 2027 reader survey to understand what you’re planning for next year: where your comms budget’s going, what you’re cutting, which issue you think owns your 2027 agenda, and what you will and won’t let AI do.

It should take about six minutes and it’s totally anonymous unless you choose otherwise. I’ll publish what I learn here in early December.

Everyone has an opinion about what comms should be doing but this is the chance to put the practitioners’ answer alongside it.

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India’s largest private-sector bank, HDFC Bank, is bringing in its first outside CEO while the executives who built the organization over the last several years all head for the exit. The bank says nothing important will change. But after a year in which its chairman quit over ethics, it raises the question: which parts is it promising to keep?

On Saturday’s earnings call, outgoing CEO Sashidhar Jagdishan told the stock exchanges that Kaizad Bharucha, its deputy managing director (effectively the number two), would leave at the end of December. Bharucha joined in 1995, a year after the bank opened; Jagdishan called him “a founding member” and one of the key architects of the bank’s credit architecture, meaning the system it uses to decide who gets a loan and on what terms. He said the departure would be “a big loss to the institution.”

Bharucha was on the call and when Jagdishan finished, Bharucha said, “Thank you, Sashi,” the CFO signed off, and that was that.

It’s one small moment in a much bigger transition.

Jagdishan himself finishes on October 26, after six years as CEO and three decades at the bank. He chose to go. In late August he told the board he wouldn’t seek a third term, and the bank said it tried to change his mind. His successor, Anup Bagchi, takes over October 27, the first chief executive HDFC Bank has ever hired from outside. Bharucha, whom Reuters identified in August as a likely CEO candidate requested to leave at the end of December. The CFO Srinivasan Vaidyanathan also retires November 30.

And all of this follows a bruising year.

In March, then-chairman Atanu Chakraborty resigned with a letter saying certain practices at the bank were “not in congruence with my personal values and ethics,” and then declined to say what they were. Two outside law firms the bank hired found no basis for his statement in June, a finding with a big asterisk, since Chakraborty never even sat down for an interview. In July the board fined Jagdishan and two other senior executives a token amount (about $1,200 each) and issued warning letters over a lending arrangement it called “business overreach,” while finding nobody had gained personally.

By Monday the stock was down nearly 28 percent this year, against an 11.5 percent fall in India’s Nifty 50.

HDFC is really asking people to believe three different things, and it’s been saying them as if they were one. That losing these people won’t hurt. That what makes the bank good will carry on. And that whatever the chairman objected to, and whatever got the CEO a warning letter in July, won’t. The third one is the hard part. “Nothing important will change” sounds reassuring until you remember March, when it starts to sound like a problem.

The handover message

What interests me is how deliberately the outgoing and incoming leaders have tried to position this.

Jagdishan and Bagchi appeared together on both of Saturday’s calls, the one for analysts and the one for reporters, which gave both audiences a rare chance to hear the handover directly rather than just reading about it.

Jagdishan’s message was that the culture would survive the departures. On the media call he said the bank has always been driven by processes rather than any one personality, that its ethos would remain intact, and that the long-serving leaders around Bagchi would be “the fulcrum” supporting him.

Bagchi, for his part, resisted the temptation to announce a new strategy on day one. Instead he thanked Jagdishan for steering the bank through the post-pandemic years, the merger with its former parent HDFC Ltd, and years of spending on technology and branches. He said he’d talk to regulators, customers, shareholders and employees before setting any priorities. And he put a timeline on himself saying he’d present his thinking on growth, margins, quality and productivity “soon,” which Jagdishan, twice, translated as about a month.

That’s a sensible choice, especially for an outsider walking into a place with a complicated year behind it and a strong culture of its own.

But there’s a limit to how far that message can carry the bank.

The problem with promising continuity

HDFC’s story rests on two ideas: the institution is stronger than any individual, and its experienced management team will provide continuity.

Both may be true.

But continuity is an odd thing to promise after this particular year. Continuity of what? The credit discipline, yes. The process-driven culture Jagdishan described, yes. The habits that produced a chairman’s resignation letter and a set of warning letters? The bank would say those were never part of the ethos. Fine, but it hasn’t said that explicitly, and until it does, “everything important will survive” is an invitation to ask whether that includes the parts the chairman walked out over.

That’s the first problem with the promise. The second is how the bank describes the people who are leaving.

In its October 17 filing, the board called the bank’s credit architecture “one of its defining institutional strengths” and recognised Bharucha as “one of the principal architects” who built it. Jagdishan said the same thing on the call, with more emotion. That’s the board’s formal position, not a colleague’s send-off, and it’s exactly what makes “the institution is bigger than any one leader” harder to say in a single breath.

Then, back in March, on an analyst call the day after the chairman resigned, Jagdishan told analysts he had “the highest regard and respect” for Bharucha, that he’d take on more responsibilities as the bank reviewed its structure, and that “he’s going to be there for the next three years, which is going to be one of our best years in the history of the bank.” India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, which has to approve senior appointments at every bank, had just signed off on Bharucha’s three-year reappointment.

Seven months later, Bharucha has requested to leave in December.

That doesn’t tell us why. The filing says he asked for early retirement; Jagdishan said it was a personal call, like his own. Media have called it being passed over, and there’s a duller possibility underneath which is that the central bank caps an executive director’s time on a bank board at 15 years, Bharucha joined the board in 2014, and analysts noted in August that he couldn’t serve a full three-year CEO term without a waiver.

What the March remarks do show is how fast a bank’s publicly stated expectations for its own leadership can change, even while it’s asking investors to trust its assurances about continuity. If one of your defining strengths was built by someone who’s now leaving, how do you show that the strength belongs to the institution and not the person?

The answer can’t be another assurance about management depth. And the answer to the first question, which parts of the past year leave with the people who are leaving, can’t be silence.

What I’d want the communications team working on

HDFC has done real succession work here. The new CFO has been in place since September, the board has proposed moving its longtime credit chief, Jimmy Tata, onto the board as an executive director, pending the central bank’s sign-off, and created another board-level seat that Bagchi will help fill once he’s in, the outside review is finished and filed, the board disciplined its CEO, and the new CEO has said he’ll lay out his priorities soon, which Jagdishan put at about a month.

The problem is that all of it is spread across five months of filings and earnings calls, and the bank has never told the succession story and the governance story together. Nobody has pulled it into one consistent story a branch manager or an analyst could repeat back: who’s taking over, what they’re keeping, and what the bank has decided to stop doing. The bank keeps saying “depth of management.” But saying the bench is deep isn’t the same as naming who’s on it, and it says nothing about the governance and ethics question.

For any comms leader in this situation, where the people leaving are the ones everyone associates with what the company does well, closing that gap is the job. Here’s how it should flow:

Put the plan on one page and hand it out. Every announcement already exists somewhere in a filing: who’s replacing whom, when they start, what they now own. Pulling it together costs the bank nothing but changes its posture, so instead of being asked what the plan is, it’s handing people the plan and inviting them to use it. And “who’s running lending now” gets answered with consistency and an assigned name.

Have the new CEO open with what stays, and name what stops. Everyone expects an outsider to announce changes. What earns trust is naming what he’s keeping and why. But after a year like this one, the keep list only works next to a short stop list, and Bagchi is the one person who can deliver it without it reading as an admission. He wasn’t here. He can say “the credit discipline stays, the process culture stays, and the practices behind the July warning letters are finished” in a way no insider could. The bank has been treating “outsider” as a problem to manage but here it’s the asset. Do that first and people will listen to the rest.

Keep the two governance stories separate. The chairman’s exit and the July fine have blurred into “governance concerns.” Say the review is closed but then say the fine shows a board willing to act against its own executives, because that’s what oversight looks like when it works. And connect it to the handover: the board that disciplined the last CEO is the one hiring the next one. That sentence does more for “continuity” than anything else.

Jagdishan leaves Sunday. The CFO goes November 30, Bharucha December 31, and Bagchi’s thinking is due somewhere in there, if Jagdishan’s month timeline holds. Inside ten weeks, three of the people most associated with how this bank runs will be gone, and an outsider will have told the world what he’s keeping and what he’s moving on from. Whether the institution really is bigger than any one leader is one question but whether anyone believes it depends on whether the bank shows its work before those dates, or after.