Boi Pens Rs 250 Crore, 3-Year Tech Plan

Bank of India (BoI) has drawn up a three-year technology plan to become a tech-savvy institution by networking its operations, establishing intra and inter-city branch connectivity and setting up automated teller machines (ATMs) at strategic locations across the country. It has envisaged an expenditure of around Rs 250 crore to achieve this objective.

The bank, which has partially computerised 1,017 branches and fully computerised 533 branches covering over 70 per cent of the business undertaken as on March 31, 2001, plans to replicate the success of its 'Hyderabad experience', whereby it established inter-connectivity between its three branches there with the Mumbai main branch so that a customer with a unique account number can operate his account from any of the four branches, to the four metros and Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chandigarh and Pune.

"We will establish inter as well as intra-city inter-connectivity between 275 branches, which account for 50 to 55 per cent of the bank's business, so as to facilitate anywhere banking in nine major cities by the end of this fiscal," S C Jain, general manager (information technology) said.

To provide the convenience of odd-hour, anytime banking, BoI will be installing about 300 ATMs at strategic points such as branches, airports, railway stations and departmental stores.

"Given the fact that space is at a premium, the idea behind our ATM thrust is that we do not want crowding of branches for meeting basic customer requirements like cash withdrawals, for depositing cheques and getting statement of balance. The ATMs are an effort at taking the bank to the doorstep of the customer. This will also allow the staff to devote more attention to core banking activities," Jain said.

BoI has in effect adopted a three-pronged flanking strategy, whereby it has segmented its branches as per the competitive threat. While in the case of metro and urban areas it is establishing connectivity between branches and also providing ATMs to facilitate anywhere and anytime banking to meet competition from the private and foreign sector banks, in the case of semi-urban areas, where such hi-tech environment is not required and the thrust is on 'personal touch' the bank is just computerising the branches.

To meet the needs of the rural customer, the bank will resort to a cluster approach. The rural branches, which are faced with infrastructural bottlenecks like power deficiency, will only deal with front office activities, while the back-office and house-keeping operations will be dealt with by the respective zonal offices.