India’s leading banks need to mimic the mass scale of Chinese financial institutions if they are to meet increasing demands for infrastructure investment and economic development, the head of the country’s largest private bank by assets has said.

Chanda Kochhar, chief executive of ICICI, told the Financial Times that her bank planned to open its first full branch in Shanghai this year, while also predicting possible future consolidation in the sector as Indian banks sought global scale during the next decade.

However, Ms Kochhar warned that problems of weakening asset quality and bad debts among India’s largest industrial companies could worsen in the short term, against a backdrop of sluggish growth in Asia’s third-largest economy that has seen bank expansion slow sharply.