1.SBT has announced a sharp increase in the interest rates for FCNR and NRE term deposits.
2.IOB has increased its interest rates on FCNR deposits with effect from November 1, 2006. CUB and KVB too have hiked these rates.
3.HDFC Bank has won the Nasscom best user award for IT.
4.Banks need to be responsive to the changing environment and the needs of their customers to be in the race, according to the Karnataka Bank Chairman, Mr Ananthakrishna. Karnataka Bank is talking to a group of financial institutions in India and Japan to form a joint venture for promoting non-life insurance products. The talks are at an advanced level and the joint venture might become a reality in a couple of months.
5.BOI, Visakhapatnam zone, is planning to open 3/4 more branches in Visakhapatnam and the two Godavari dts. The zone, comprising seven coastal districts from Srikakulam to Guntur, has 47 branches, has a business of Rs 1,567 crs and earned an operating profit of Rs 32 crs.
6.BOB has plans for major overseas expansion and is set to commission its ninth overseas branch in London in 2007. It is looking at setting up branches in Canada, West Indies, New Zealand, Bahrain, Qatar, China and South Africa. It is now scouting for joint venture partners for life insurance foray, and foreign partners for bank's asset management, credit card businesses, and share broking and online trading business arms. It launched its 11th retail loan factory at Hyderabad. The loan factory is an innovative retail delivery model designed to provide a unique experience to the bank's customers, adding to their convenience.
7.`Financial inclusion' is an issue laden with a legacy baggage dating back to 5,000 years and presents us with complexities that calls for a Herculean effort to get sorted out, said Dr K. C. Chakrabarty, CMD, Indian Bank.
8.While banks have been talking extensively about technology-based approach towards financial inclusion, they are yet to build a suitable technology infrastructure. This seemed to be the observation of the panelists during a session on `Technology solutions and process management' at Bancon 2006. While bankers conceded that technology was only an enabler and not a plug-and-play solution in banking, they appeared to concur with the view that there was a need to map business architecture to technology.
9.Delivering the valedictory address at BanCon 2006, Dr Y. V. Reddy, said: "Banks should move to the masses as a natural process of financial inclusion". This included taking deposits from rural and semi urban regions in the country. He said: "Financial inclusion should be treated as a business investment." Bankers should focus on small loans to the farm sector and small and medium enterprises and smaller liabilities. This was because most of the large corporates have "disintermediated" and have begun to directly access the financial markets.
10. The Chairman of the Economic Advisory council to the PM, Dr C. Rangarajan, has opposed reduction of interest rates to self help groups in the country. Delivering the special address at Bancon 2006, he said: "They (SHGs) should be provided credit at moderate rates of interest. But lowering the rate of interest defeats the very nature of these groups."The SHG concept has worked well so far. However, he said that they needed to move forward. SHGs currently cover about 32.96 mn households.
