Vijaya Bank rolls out new initiatives to up CASA ratio

Bangalore-headquartered public sector lender Vijaya Bank has launched e-deposit facility to facilitate term deposits by customers in its bid to ramp up deposit base of the bank. “E-deposit will facilitate the existing Vijaya Bank customers to open term deposit accounts through e-banking facility,” H S Upendra Kamath, chairman and managing director of Vijaya Bank said.

He also said that this would help ramping up a deposit base of the bank. Referring to this matter, Subhalakshmi Panse, executive director of the bank, said this facility would not only increase term deposit base of the bank, but would also boost current account, savings account (CASA) ratio by bringing in new customers.

Vijaya Bank is aggressively focusing on increasing its CASA ratio through new client acquisition and coming up with technology driven products to facilitate the same. “Like e-deposit, the bank will come up with other technology-driven products in the near future,” Kamath said.

The bank reported a 58.5 per cent drop in its net profit at Rs 54.23 crore for the fourth quarter of last financial year compared to the year-ago period on account of provisions for wage revision. The operating profit of the bank stood at Rs 109.9 crore, a drop of 65 per cent. The total income of the bank during the quarter rose 15.8 per cent to Rs 1,751.6 crore, compared with Rs 1,511.6 crore in the year-ago period.

Interest income rose 22.08 per cent to Rs 1,609 crore during this period as compared with Rs 1,318 crore reported an year earlier. Vijaya Bank, which has declared the present fiscal as the 'year of retail and recovery', has set a target to grow by 22 per cent in the retail segment to boost its current account, savings account portfolio. The public lender also aims to recover around Rs 1,000 crore from non-performing assets (NPA) to increase its asset quality.

The bank, which acts as a corporate agent for Life Insurance Corporation, is also looking at a possibility of a tie-up in life insurance space after the exit of Punjab National Bank from the joint venture agreement.