Federal Bank to go slow on branch expansion: MD

Private sector Federal Bank would go slow on physical branch expansion across new geographies and would rather adopt the digital transformation to increase business, its MD and CEO Shyam Srinivasan said.
"Our bank has a network of 1252 branches across the country. At the moment, we are not giving priority to increase brick and mortar branches", Srinivasan said.
He said that the bank would rather deploy more customer relationship managers at its existing branches to acquire accounts.
The bank today launched three digital initiatives namely in the fields of instant account opening using Aadhaar number, e-payment system without a physical POS machine, and UPI-based merchant transactions.

Srinivasan said the bank was expected to garner one per cent of the country's credit book by the end of March 2017.
He said during the demonetisation period starting November 2016, the bank's credit growth was 32 per cent.

Till March end, the expected credit off was 25 per cent.
Srinivasan said the bank might need capital in 2018 to support growth.
Federal Bank has got the approval to open representative office in Bahrain and in the Dubai International Financial Centre.