Bank Quest: The Quarterly Journal of the Indian Institute of Banking and Finance
Bank Quest is the quarterly journal of the Indian Institute of Banking and Finance (IIBF), the Mumbai-headquartered professional body for bankers in India. Published since 1930, it is among the oldest banking journals in the country, carrying articles on contemporary topics in banking and finance written by experienced professionals, academics and researchers. Theme-based, listed in the UGC CARE list of journals, and explicitly designed as an instrument of continuing professional development for the institute's members, Bank Quest occupies a distinctive place in Indian publishing: part scholarly journal, part professional forum, through which India's banking community has debated its own future for more than nine decades.
Roots in an Institute Founded in 1928
Bank Quest's publisher gives the journal its context. The Indian Institute of Banking and Finance was established in 1928 as a company under Section 25 of the Indian Companies Act, 1913, formerly known as the Indian Institute of Bankers. It is a professional body of banks, financial institutions and their employees in India, managed by a governing council that includes representatives of major banks, the Reserve Bank of India, the Indian Banks' Association, the Institute of Banking Personnel Selection and an academician from IIT Bombay. Over more than nine decades the institute has become India's premier body for banking and finance education, awarding qualifications such as JAIIB and CAIIB and offering the courses mandated by the Reserve Bank of India for capacity building in banks. Bank Quest, begun just two years after the institute itself, is its longest-running publication.
Publishing Since 1930
The institute states that it has been publishing Bank Quest, containing articles on contemporary topics in banking and finance, since 1930. That start date places the journal's origins in the final decades of colonial India, before the Reserve Bank of India itself had fully matured and long before bank nationalisation, liberalisation or digital banking. Few Indian professional journals can claim a comparable span. Through that long run, the journal's pages form a running record of Indian banking's concerns in each era — from the mechanics of branch banking to, in a January–March 2015 special feature on contemporary issues in banking, the detailed capital optimisation requirements of Basel III, including common equity tiers, capital buffers and the treatment of hybrid instruments under Reserve Bank of India prescriptions.
A Theme-Based Quarterly
Bank Quest is published quarterly and is known as a theme-based journal: issues are organised around contemporary themes in the banking, financial services and insurance sector. The institute has also used the format flexibly, bringing out special editions linked to major professional gatherings. For a special edition prepared for the APABI conference on the theme "Paradigm Shift in Banking: Advancing Towards a Resilient, Inclusive and Sustainable Model", invited themes included emerging opportunities for savings and investments, preparing future-ready banking professionals, digital transformation of the banking landscape, climate risk and sustainable finance, and data-driven banking using big data and artificial intelligence. That list captures the journal's editorial centre of gravity: not archival scholarship for its own sake, but the live questions — technology, inclusion, sustainability, risk — that working bankers must answer now.
Objectives: Knowledge and Continuing Professional Development
The journal's stated objective is to present the theory, practice, analysis, views and research findings on issues and developments which have relevance for the current and future of the banking and finance industry. Its aim is to provide a platform for the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) of the members of the institute, and to create a space for academics to disseminate original research outcomes and innovative knowledge in banking and finance. This purpose is embedded in the institute's own systems: IIBF's CPD score card awards credits for articles published in Bank Quest, treating contribution to the journal as a recognised professional-development activity for bankers. The journal thus sits inside a formal learning economy — reading it keeps members updated, and writing for it counts toward their professional standing.
Editorial Process and How to Contribute
Bank Quest accepts original, unpublished work in English or Hindi that is not under consideration elsewhere, submitted to the editor at the institute. Each article is initially assessed by the editor for general suitability and may then be sent for review by experts in the field; on the basis of reviewer feedback an article is accepted or rejected, and where minor corrections are suggested the contributor is asked to rectify the points raised before the article is considered for publication, with the editor retaining discretion over the process. Articles are expected to follow a uniform template: a title focused on the core of the work, an abstract, introduction and background, a statement of the problem, a review of literature, a theoretical or conceptual framework and objectives. The structure is deliberately scholarly, even though many contributors are practitioners rather than career academics.
What Bank Quest Publishes
The journal's content is deliberately broad across the banking and finance domain. Institute yearbooks that collect Bank Quest articles organise the material under heads that map the modern Indian bank: regulatory changes across credit, retail banking, digital banking and information technology, international banking, treasury and risk management, compliance, rural banking, co-operative banks, non-banking financial companies and differentiated banks, together with legal and economic changes. Speeches by senior Reserve Bank of India officials and snapshot analyses of trends in the banking sector have also featured in the institute's publications drawn from the journal. The emphasis falls on analysis and views grounded in practice — how a regulation will work, how a technology changes a branch, how a risk framework should be applied — rather than on purely theoretical modelling.
Standing: The UGC CARE List and the IIBF Family
Bank Quest has been included in Group B of the UGC CARE list of journals, a listing that gives its articles academic recognition in India alongside their professional readership. Within the institute's own publishing family, Bank Quest is one of two regular publications: the other is IIBF Vision, a monthly bulletin documenting important changes in the banking and finance domain and serving as a platform for knowledge sharing across the banking fraternity. The institute also sends members a daily e-newsletter, Fin @ Quest, and publishes reports based on research studies it commissions on subjects of topical importance to bankers and finance professionals. In that family, the monthly Vision handles news and change, while the quarterly Bank Quest provides the deeper, refereed, article-length treatment — the place where a topic is examined rather than merely reported.
Research Culture Around the Journal
Bank Quest is fed by, and feeds, a wider research culture at the institute. IIBF runs research schemes for bankers and academicians — macro research, micro research, the Diamond Jubilee and C. H. Bhabha Banking Overseas Research Fellowship, and a scheme for research in banking technology run jointly with the Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology — and encourages peer review, with scholarships and monetary support for deserving researchers, drawing encouraging responses from leading business schools and IITs. Winning micro research, if published in Bank Quest, earns recognition under the CPD framework. The institute also organises seminars, conferences and two prestigious memorial lectures — the Shri R. K. Talwar Memorial Lecture and the Sir Purshotamdas Thakurdas Memorial Lecture — whose themes and speakers belong to the same world of banking thought that the journal documents in print.
A Record of Indian Banking's Transformation
Read across its long life, Bank Quest mirrors the transformation of Indian banking itself. A journal founded in 1930 served a small, largely urban banking system; its modern issues serve a system of universal digital payments, differentiated banks, climate-risk frameworks and artificial-intelligence-driven operations, overseen by the Reserve Bank of India and populated by professionals the institute itself has trained and certified. The journal's continuity through nationalisation, the 1991 reforms, the global financial crisis — whose lessons fill its Basel III coverage — and the digital revolution gives it an archival value beyond any single issue. For historians of Indian finance, as for working bankers, its back run is a primary source on how the industry understood itself at each stage.
Bank Quest Today
Today Bank Quest continues as IIBF's quarterly, theme-based journal from Mumbai, published in English and Hindi, listed in the UGC CARE list, and addressed to banking and finance professionals, academics and the institute's large membership. It remains one element of a complete professional ecosystem — courses and examinations such as JAIIB and CAIIB, a monthly vision bulletin, a daily newsletter, commissioned research, seminars and memorial lectures — through which the institute, founded in 1928, pursues professional excellence in Indian banking. In a media landscape where most Indian magazines are commercial products, Bank Quest stands out as a professional body's own journal: nearly a century old, refereed, theme-driven, and still organised around a simple founding idea — that bankers should keep learning, in print, from one another.
