1. Exim Bank of India is negotiating with "a multilateral lending agency" for a $250-mn loan to fund small and medium enterprises.The process of due diligence is on and the agreement is likely to be firmed up in two months.
2. Standard Chartered Bank has announced a grant of Rs 2.27 crs to Sankar Foundation Eye Hospital for the construction of a hospital at Vepagunta in Visakhapatnam district. The contribution under the bank's `Seeing is Believing' programme aims to help restore sight to people suffering from avoidable blindness. It is expected to reach out to the people in neighbouring Srikakulam and Vizianagaram districts too.
3. Corporation Bank's credit card business is likely to take off in February this year. It has decided to tie-up with Visa International for this purpose.
4. Housing finance corporations/banks are talking of extending repayment periods to 20 or 25 years so that borrowers can cope with rising interest rates and EMIs. There are also proposals to extend the maturity of existing loans, so long as they get paid before retirement. For someone borrowing Rs 10 lakh at 10 per cent a year, a twenty-five year repayment, instead of twelve, lowers EMI from Rs 12,000 to Rs 9,000. Net repayments, after tax deductions, would be much smaller in both cases.
5. China, the largest populated nation that has over the last two decades successfully embraced what it calls a `socialistic market economy', has notched up one more distinction. Its forex reserves, mainly in US dollars, recently crossed the one-trillion mark. This formidable figure is much bigger than the combined reserves of major Asian economies such as Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.
6. LIC Housing Finance Ltd is striving to reduce its net NPA to below 1% by next year. With its recovery department backing the ambitious target by constantly improving recoveries, LICHFL has been able to bring its net NPA to 1.9%during the third quarter of FY 2006-07 from 3.1% in the same period in 2005.
7. After Bank of India introduced CBS, many employees became redundant. The bank redeployed about 1,200 of them into marketing. Since mid-2005, these employees have been seeking low cost deposits. It was chiefly due to this that the bank was able to outperform the industry with a 78% growth in net profit for the third quarter of the current year. (The bank's net profit grew to Rs 254 crs from Rs 143 crs in the corresponding quarter of last year.)
8. Bank of Baroda has tied up with India Infoline to offer an online-trading service, `Baroda E-trading'. The bank has entered into an alliance with India Infoline for providing a brokerage platform, besides research and analysis service to the customers.
9. The Finance Minister, Mr P. Chidambaram, has made it clear that there was no proposal to merge any Regional Rural Bank (RRB) with the sponsoring parent bank and that they would continue to remain under the parent bank.
10. Spurred by higher net interest income, BOB has registered 62.8% growth in Q3 net profit at Rs 329.13 crs, against Rs 202.18 crs in the corresponding period of the previous year.
