| India Infoline, the second biggest listed retail financial services firm, will expand its branches from the current 200 to 400 over the next 10 months, the company said today.
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| Having established its presence in nearly the top 100 cities in the country, the Rs 220 crore company said the expansion plan would be focussed on smaller, district-level towns across the country.
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| It is also planning to tie-up with banks without a significant presence in broking to integrate its platform with the bank's services.
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| “Our business has been growing at nearly 80 per cent for the last two to three years and the profits touched nearly Rs 50 crore last year. Our strategy now is to go for the smaller tier-III towns like Patan,” said Harshad Apte, Associate Vice President of the company.
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| Five-year-old Infoline, which went public with a Rs 90-crore IPO a year ago, is one of the biggest players in the web-based, retail broking and financial services business and has branched out into distribution of financial products like mutual funds and insurance recently.
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| The current expansion is the second biggest consolidated move by the company after it had to roll-back some of its earlier branches due to back-up problems in the initial phase.
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| “The setting up of branches will be based on local intelligence to guage the prospects for such services in small towns and will be supported by off-line or phone broking support as well,” Apte added. The firm will hold investor awareness seminars in the towns it plans to enter.
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| “There is an unexpected demand for investor services even in small towns... and we believe that our life-time pre-paid broking account for Rs 555 puts us in a good position to tap low-volume areas as well,” he added.
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| Indian Infoline is the second biggest listed investor-services and financial-instrument distribution firm in India. It posted revenues of Rs 218.05 crore during the year ended March 2006 and has a presence in 19 states of the country. |
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