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| All Bank to tap South, West | |
| BS Reporter / Kolkata/ Bhubaneswar November 15, 2008, 0:26 IST | |
The Kolkata headquartered Allahabad Bank will focus on the southern and western states and plans to open about 13 new branches in Gujarat, 17 branches in Punjab and 18 new branches in Tamil Nadu by the end of 2009-10. This comes after the bank’s consolidation in the east and the north.
“We want to resume a national character and intend to open 15 branches in each state. After the consolidation in the east and the north we will now focus on west and south”, K R Kamath, chairman and the managing director (CMD), Allahabad Bank said. Kamath said, the bank has so far opened 64 branches during the current fiscal and has 66 authorisations in hand to open branches.
Similarly, the bank has submitted applications to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for opening 180 new branches during 2009-10. Responding to a query, whether the recent slowdown has impacted the credit growth of the bank, he said, the credit growth has been higher than the target. While the bank had set a target of 20 percent growth in credit during this fiscal, it was 29 percent by November 2008 on a year-on-year basis.
However, the bank will try to moderate the credit growth to 20 to 25 percent. “Drying up of other sources of funding like the external commercial borrowings (ECB) and private equity (PE) has resulted in higher fund demand from the banks and consequent growth in the credit disbursal of the bank”, Kamath said. Stating that the bank has a capital adequacy ratio (CAR) of 11.46 percent by the end of September 2008, he said, this is higher than the stipulated norm of 9 percent.
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