UCO Bank plans to open shop overseas

Seeking to expand its presence in overseas markets, state owned-UCO Bank plans to open more branches in the South East Asian region, a top bank official said.

"Currently, we are looking at expansion overseas... There are opportunities in South East Asia... Mozambique, Bangladesh, Nepal. Wherever we can open a branch with less capital (in this region), we will open," UCO Bank Chairman and Managing Director Arun Kaul told PTI here.

He said the Kolkata-headquartered bank was yet to approach the Reserve Bank for expanding its overseas operations. "We just conducted a feasibility study," he said.

Currently, UCO Bank has four branches in Singapore and Malaysia and a representative office in Beijing, China.

Besides the overseas expansion, the bank also plans to increase its presence in the country over the next two years.

"We are present in 2,177 locations and have 600 ATMs. We want to have 3,000 branches and 3,000 ATMs in the country by March, 2013," Kaul, who was here yesterday, said.

"As of now we have a subscriber base of over 1.5 crore. We want to leverage that and if we increase our presence we will be able to add more customers...," he said.

Asked whether the bank would invest on setting up of ATMs, he replied in the negative saying they would be "outsourced".

Talking about other future plans, he said the bank would focus on increasing the contribution from its CASA ratio (Current Account Savings Account) to 35 per cent from the present 25 per cent.

"Our CASA ratio is 25 per cent. We want to increase it to 35 per cent... For achieving that, we will be looking at territories where we do not have presence," Kaul said.

Elaborating, he said the bank considered the RBI's report on places where banks' presence was less. "We are slow and late in technology... We just completed cent per cent Core Banking Solution last year... Now we like to leverage technologies. We are also looking at improving the frontline personnel of the bank. We train them properly so that they will excel in serving the customers well," he said.

Source: Business Standard