A study of 21 large banks in the country has found that foreign banks,

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led by Citi India, have the highest employee cost and HDFC has the lowest with the state-run lenders getting sandwiched in the middle.

According to the Boston Consulting Group, Citi India leads the pack of salary cost in relation to the asset base with the average cost being a Rs 19 lakh as of last fiscal, followed by StanChart at Rs 13 lakh and HSBC at Rs 12.3 lakh.

But what is to be noted here is that Citi India also makes its employees pay back the maximum with its average revenue per employee standing at Rs 127 lakh, way above SBI's average revenue of Rs 20 lakh per employee.

At the fourth slot is the mid-sized public sector bank Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) with an average salary cost of Rs 6.5 lakh per employee, thereby making it at the top of the PSBs.

Against this, the largest lender SBI has a notch down at Rs 6.4 lakh per employee while the new-age state-run bank IDBI Bank and Oriental Bank of Commerce cough up Rs 6.3 lakh each on their every employee on an average.

While banking behemoth SBI has over 2 lakh employees as of last fiscal, Citi India has just about 7,500, and the Chennai-based IOB has about 30,000 employees. State Bank employees together generated Rs 1,33,851 crore in revenues with a profit of Rs 11,733 crore in the past fiscal.

Similarly, IOB also has the largest cost to income ratio among these banks at 67 per cent, while Citi has one of the lowest at 24 per cent, which is topped by HSBC at 23 per cent. For SBI, this stands at 51 per cent, says the BCG study.