Bank of India mulls Business Process Re-engineering

The public sector Bank of India (BoI), which targets to take its business to about Rs 12 lakh crore in next 5-6 years, mulls to implement Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) initiates to streamline its growing business.

Seven consultants, including Ernst &Young, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and McKinsey, have expressed interest to take up job of evaluation and restructuring of the organisational set up of the bank.

The bank is currently short-listing the consultants and its board of directors would soon take a decision on the matter in its next meeting, a top executive of the bank said here.

“The board has in principle decided to adopt the BPR initiative to face competition. The evaluation of the proposals is going on and a decision is going to be taken in the next board meeting of the bank”, Alok Misra, chairman-managing director (CMD), Bank of India (BoI) said here.

Talking to the media a day before the board meeting of the bank, which is being held first time in Bhubaneswar, Misra said, the bank has a branch network of 3159 at present. This would have to be increased to about 5000-7000 over the next five years.

To meet the credit need of the corporate sector and help in faster decision making on the loans, the bank would set up one corporate branch in every state. Accordingly, a corporate branch of the bank would come up in Bhubaneswar soon.

The bank would recruit 3295 employees in next two months which would include 2250 officers in various departments like agriculture, statistics, and marketing among others.

Similarly, the bank has obtained the approval for opening a subsidiary branch in New Zealand and this is going to be launched soon. It has also applied for opening a branch in Canada. As a measure towards financial inclusion, the bank has opened 40 lakh no-frills accounts and issued 1 lakh bio-metric cards.

On Orissa, the BoI chief said, five more braches are proposed to be opened by March this year taking the total to 134. This would further be increased to 150 by September and all the districts would be covered in the next 2-3 years, he added. It may be noted, the bank has a business of Rs 5250 crore with a branch network of 129 in Orissa.