Bank of India plans 'big' retail vertical

Bank of India plans to focus big on its retail vertical, by setting up 20 retail centres across the country. "We are looking at branch hub-and-spokes and retail processing centres closely," Mr N. Seshadri, Executive Director, Bank of India, told.

A pilot for making branches sales centres, and not service units, is already underway, he said.

"We plan to take the entire service part of operations to the back office," said Mr Seshadri. The idea is to ensure that the entire focus at a branch is as a sales unit.

He also added that the bank was focusing on re-balancing their corporate to retail portfolio because of margin shrinkage.

"We want to go up a couple of percentage points in terms of the whole portfolio from corporate to retail over a period of time," said Mr Seshadri. The increasing interest rates have not impacted the bank's retail portfolio so far, "mainly because we have rescheduled repayment schedules of our customers", he said. But if the interest rates are very high for a long period of time, there could be some impact, he added.

The bank is also looking at expanding its footprint overseas by "either acquisitions or branches depending on local regulatory requirements", he said. Countries on the bank's radar include Botswana, Rwanda and Canada. The bank recently started operations in New Zealand, he pointed out.

Bank of India is expecting capital infusion from the Government in the second half of this fiscal, Mr Seshadri said. According to him, the bank has a total capital requirement of Rs 4,000 crore over the next two years.

Capital infusion could either be through a rights issue, follow-on offer or a combination of instruments. Currently, the Government's shareholding in Bank of India is about 66 per cent.