Indian Bank explores opportunities to increase overseas presence

Kolkata, Feb 02 (UNI) Century-old Indian Bank, which has decided to tap the capital market next week to augment the capital base and meet other future requrements, is also exploring the opportunity to open several more foreign offices in quick succession.

Speaking to newsmen here today about the performance of the Chennai-based Bank, its Executive Director M S Sunderrajan said after the Bank had recorded about 40 per cent growth in terms of net profitability during the first six months of the current fiscal, they were exploring the opportunity of spreading its overseas wings further to meet the increasing demand from the NRI community.

Further elaborating, Mr Sunderajan said though the Bank presently had two profit-making branches in Singapore and Colombo, which contributed about three per cent of the Indian Bank's global business of more than Rs 60,000 crore till Spetember last, it was now considering to open a number of branches or representative offices in different other parts of the world, including in the Middle East, South East Asia and South Africa before this year end.

Refusing to elaborate further on his future plans because of the SEBI guidelines, the Indian Bank Executive Director, however, said senior Bank officials, including he himself, had already visited a number of countries like South Africa, Malaysia and UAE and found huge scopes of opening new business centres in these areas because of considerable NRI presence there.

To a query on whether the Bank had already applied to RBI or to the Banking regulatory authorities of the concerned countries for its overseas expansion, Mr Sunderajan replied in the negative.

About his plan for domestic expansion to add to the present 1402 branches, the Indian Bank ED said following the business turnaround they were also planning to open at least 50 branches every year till 2009. " Since we have considerable presence in the South and the West, we are now planning to make our presence felt in the East and the North East by opening most of our branches in these regions. " Asked about the future of the recent joining hands among the Indian Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce and the Corporation Bank, better known as the OIC Alliance, Mr Sunderajan said the synergy has been just paying rich dividents in terms of boosting business opportunities despite retaining their own identity.

UNI