The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Indian Bank goes in for mass banking

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, May 18, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Indian Bank goes in for mass banking

R. Gopalakrishnan

CHENNAI: Deployment of technology to move towards "mass banking" from "class banking," is among the basic objectives of Indian Bank, says its outgoing Chairman and Managing Director K.C.Chakrabarty.

The Rs. 300-crore investment that the bank has made in technology upgradation, especially at the branch level in terms of computerisation, will pay for itself as more and more people from non-elite sections use the bank's services, Mr. Chakrabarty said, talking to journalists from The Hindu group of publications here on Wednesday.

The bank was also investing in offsite facilities such as V-Sat terminals in rural areas and deploying the services of business facilitators to reach out to the public.

Following the success of its 100 per cent financial inclusion pilot project in Puducherry, the bank would launch the programme in Cuddalore shortly.

The CMD said that despite its lending to the agricultural sector to the extent of 21 per cent of its net bank credit [against a minimum of 18 per cent mandated by the Reserve Bank of India], Indian Bank had managed to keep its prime lending rates at a level which was the lowest in the industry. Its interest rate on housing loans was also the lowest as of now.

In terms of the revised guidelines for priority sector lending issued by the RBI recently, under which lending to certain classes of better-off sections had been removed from the purview of the programme, Indian Bank's performance would approach sixty per cent [against the mandatory minimum of 40 per cent], since it had always lent money to the ordinary citizen. The bank depended upon Tamil Nadu for 50 per cent of its business.

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