1. ICICI Bank will issue a 5.9% stake in its proposed subsidiary (the holding company for its non-banking businesses) for Rs 2,650 crs to private investors. This would value the subsidiary at Rs 44,600 crore on a post-issue basis, said the bank in a letter to the National Stock Exchange. ICICI Bank said that discussions had been initiated with potential investors and definitive offers have been received for the subscription to equity shares of the proposed subsidiary. The bank did not elaborate on the identity of its potential investors.
2. HDFC Bank has bagged the Best Retail Bank in India award at the sixth Asian Banker Excellence in Retail Financial Services Awards function held in Shanghairecently. At the same programme, ICICI Bank won the inaugural Excellence in Remittance Business award for outstanding performance in 2006. About 150 senior bankers from award winning banks in 22 countries across the Asia Pacific, the Gulf Region and Central Asia attended the programme, administered by The Asian Banker.
3. IndusInd Bank may set up a wealth management subsidiary and hopes to tie-up with an overseas player for the same.
It has a comfortable capital adequacy ratio of about 12.54% and it can look at setting up a subsidiary. It may partner an overseas entity and will soon apply to RBI for permission. It has a sizeable client base of NRIs and Indian residents who are high networth individuals or mass affluent customers. The wealth management business will benefit these customers.
It has a comfortable capital adequacy ratio of about 12.54% and it can look at setting up a subsidiary. It may partner an overseas entity and will soon apply to RBI for permission. It has a sizeable client base of NRIs and Indian residents who are high networth individuals or mass affluent customers. The wealth management business will benefit these customers.
4. Ranbaxy Group promoted Religare, a financial services provider, and Indusind Bank have a
tie-up; the bank will provide a 3-in-1 offering for the bank's savings account customers with a savings and a DP account from the bank along with an Internet trading account from Religare.
Initially, Religare will provide Internet trading platform to the bank's customers eventually followed by the entire spectrum of Religare's services.
tie-up; the bank will provide a 3-in-1 offering for the bank's savings account customers with a savings and a DP account from the bank along with an Internet trading account from Religare.
Initially, Religare will provide Internet trading platform to the bank's customers eventually followed by the entire spectrum of Religare's services.
5. Karnataka Bank Ltd has targeted a forex business of Rs 8,500 crs during 2007-08. The bank, which achieved a forex merchant turnover of over Rs 6,100 crs showing a growth of around 31.53 % during 2006-07, has envisaged an addition of Rs 2,400 crs for 2007-08. During 2006-07, the export credit outstanding crossed Rs 1,100 crs amounting to 11.47 % of net bank credit of the bank. For the current fiscal, it has targeted an export credit of Rs 1,450 crs.
6. Some 35,000 women members of the Self Help Groups (SHGs) in the Nilgiris under the umbrella of Repco Foundation for Micro Credit, an NGO floated by the Union Home Ministry's Repco Bank, can now look to have their products getting internationally marketed, thanks to a memorandum of co-operation (MoC) which the Repco Bank will enter into with the Exim Bank on June 15.
7. IndusInd Bank Ltd has informed the BSE that Mr R. Seshasayee has been appointed, with the approval of Reserve Bank of India, part-time non-executive chairman of the bank for a period of two years. Mr Seshasayee is the Managing Director of Ashok Leyland, the Hinduja Group flagship company. Prior to Mr Seshasayee, Mr R.J. Shahaney was the non-executive chairman of the bank.
8. Barclays Bank PLC, which recently launched retail banking services in India, has tied up with ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company Ltd for bancassurance. ICICI Lombard will provide exclusively designed non-life insurance products for Barclays retail customers. It will also provide insurance products for Barclays customers who have availed themselves of credit cards, personal loans, SME loans, premier investment services or any other banking products.
9. Bankers may not break into a jig to the tunes of ringing cash registers in the manner of heroes of films that they finance. But they have reasons to feel happy. With a better repayment record than conventional loans, film financing has the best script in their business. "The film-financing scheme has been quite successful and bad loans so far are negligible," says Mr Jitender Balakrishnan, Deputy Managing Director, IDBI Bank, a big player in this business. For Exim Bank it is an even better story. "There are no bad loans in this segment," said Mr Mathew John, General Manager and Head-Corporate Banking, Exim Bank.
10. A 13-year-long saga of stake-sale controversy in Tamilnad Mercantile Bank ended last month, when seven foreign investors bought out the holding of Mr C. Sivasankaran. With a networth of Rs 760 crore and total business of Rs 10,067 crore, Tamilnad Mercantile Bank is one of the more profitable old private sector banks in the country. Growth had been stunted to some extent by the controversy surrounding ownership. Now with that problem gone and with a new professional at the helm of affairs, TMB is like a just-unshackled racehorse.
11. In what is arguably the first buyout led by an Indian private equity firm in the international market, ICICI Venture, the private equity arm of ICICI Bank, has acquired majority control in US-based clinical research company Radiant Research. The deal amount is not known but said to be in millions of dollars. Last year Radiant Research had sold a part of its clinical research business, constituting eight clinical pharmacology centres, to US-based clinical research company Covance for $65 million. Today, Radiant has 26 other clinical centres. Going purely by the number of centres, the current deal led by ICICI Venture could have been valued at $150 million plus.
12. The central bank’s efforts at tempering the rate of loan growth through monetary measures are paying off. According to the figures released by the RBI, loan disbursements dipped by Rs 36,672 crore since end-March 2007 to Rs 18,86,520 crore on May 25. Last fiscal, loans had dipped by Rs 13,644 crore during the same period. On a year-on-year basis, the growth was 26.3% as against 30.9% last year.
