Mumbai, Aug. 7 -- Sanjay Agarwal, the latest winner of the central bank's rare universal bank licence, may have inadvertently ticked the right boxes on his path to glory.

On Thursday, the Reserve Bank of India issued an 'in-principle' approval for Agarwal's AU Small Finance Bank totransition into a universal bank, making it the first full-fledged banking licence issued in nearly a decade.

The licence positions AU Small Finance Bank on par with India's biggest lenders while handing Agarwal a sought-after calling card as a banker.

AU Small Finance Bank, which was founded as a non-bank in 1997 and converted into a small finance bank in 2017, applied to RBI for a universal bank licence in September 2024.

Its licence is only the fifth to b...