BoB to focus on four key segments

Bank of Baroda (BoB), the fifth largest bank in India, is realigning its operations into four business lines - retail, rural and agriculture, small and medium enterprises and corporate banking -in sync with market needs.

The realignment envisages shifting of all mid-corporate and large corporate accounts from the bank's retail branches to its wholesale banking branches.

The decision to consolidate corporate accounts in about 10-15 branches has been influenced by experiences the bank had at branches with predominantly retail customers and only a few corporate accounts.

"We want to shift from functional approach to a business segment focus, especially at branches on core banking platform," said V G Subramaniam, Advisor (Strategy) at BoB.

The bank sees value in the realignment of its operations as it expects the branch managers and other staff members to be in a position to provide a better quality service to customers. Also, officials at branches may not be able to satisfy the needs of demanding corporate customers owing to inadequate skills and experience, another BoB official said.

BoB has a total of 2,708 branches - 490 of them in metropolitan cities, 495 in urban areas, 561 in semi-urban areas and 1,162 in rural areas. The bank has put 1,000 of these branches on its core banking platform, which interconnects all these branches enabling anywhere banking across these branches to customers.

Subramaniam said "implementation of core banking at 1,000 branches has released over 1,500 employees from routine functions. These employees will now be deployed for sales and business development assignments, including marketing of third party products for increasing fee-based income.

BoB's advances rose by 46.82 per cent to Rs 77,661 crore at end of December 2006 from a year earlier. The bank expects to grow at 25 per cent in 2007-08.