Union Bank to upgrade its overseas offices

Union Bank will look to upgrade its overseas representative offices into full-fledged branches, Mr Debabrata Sarkar, Chairman and Managing Director of the bank, said here on Friday.

The bank has representative offices in Shanghai, Sydney and London. It also has a financial centre in Dubai. All these four offices will be upgraded, he said. Union Bank has one branch in Hong Kong and it had done business worth Rs 10,000 crore in 2011-12.

“We are looking to upgrade them into full branches,” Mr Sarkar said on the sidelines of the ‘4th ICC Banking Summit,' here on Friday.

He, however, did not give a timeline for the conversion of the offices into branches.

According to Mr Sarkar, the bank is looking to hire 2,500-odd people during the year.

“We had hired 3,000 people last year. We are looking to hire 2,500-odd people this year,” he said.

Lending Rates

Hinting at a possible reduction in lending rates by the bank, Mr Sarkar pointed out that asset-quality will remain a concern. According to Mr Sarkar, poor asset quality might call for higher provisioning thereby impacting bank's profits.

The bank on Friday launched its re-designed branch model under the brand Union Xperience in the satellite township of Salt Lake in Kolkata.

The bank has already launched close to 100 such re-designed branches across the country so far, to offer superior experience to its customers. The bank plans to launch 250 such branches by September this year.

Union Bank has implemented a huge amount of automation in these branches through self-service machines like passbook printers, cheque deposit machines and queue management. It has also revamped the sales and service model in these branches.