Citibank launches CitiBusiness Power Access

Mumbai, Dec 13: Citibank India, a part of Citigroup, today announced the launch of 'CitiBusiness Power Access', designed to address the scale disadvantages faced by smaller businesses by leveraging on the collective power of CitiBusiness customers.

Making a formal announcement about it before the media here today, CitiBusiness Business Manager Rajiv Jamkhedkar said ''With Indian economy growing at a remarkable rate and the potential it possesses to continue the trend in future too, we are focusing our attention on the small business and professionals (SBPs) that contribute to 42 per cent of the country's GDP.'' He unveiled the findings of a five-country survey, covering 677 in Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit titled 'Tapping the entrepreneur: What powers Asia's small businesses and professionals' on the occasion.

Jamkhedkar informed that currently there were 35,000 small business banking customers with his bank. However, they were targeting only those SBPs whose annual turnovers were not more than Rs 50 crore and that fell under categories like small-scale manufacturers, merchants or service providers.

Power Access is one of the four key pillars of the bank's CitiBusiness programme, a suite of business and financial solutions targeted at the SBPs community. The CitiBusiness Power Access Partner Privelege network differentiates itself by encompassing community/sdvisory, personal business assistance and travel services, exclusive deals and discounts from its 11 empannelled service providers and access to CitiBusiness centres across 39 branches of the bank nationwide.

Talking about the performance of CitiBusiness within one year of its coming into operation in India, he said ''Our loan book has grown in excess of 50 per cent over the year and hence we have made our projections of achieving the growth rate up to 25 per cent during next year.'' Making a presentation on the findings of the study conducted by her organisation, Economist Intelligence Unit (a Hong Kong based firm) Senior Editor Bina Jang said ''Entrepreneurs are pulling Asia towards economic growth.''

UNI