IOB hopeful of returning to black as early as possible

With its focus on recovery after being saddled with non-performing assets, public sector Indian Overseas Bank on Thursday said it was expecting to return to black as early as possible though its earlier target of posting profits.

According to its top official, the city-headquartered bank expected to post profits during the April-June quarter.

"We expected to post profits during the June quarter. Now, the problems are behind us. Definitely, we want to come back to black as early as possible.", Indian Overseas Bank, Managing Director and CEO, Karnam Sekar said here.

The bank had reported net loss of Rs 342.08 crore for the April-June quarter as against net loss of Rs 919.44 crore in the corresponding quarter of previous year.

Total income fell 6 per cent to Rs 5,006.48 crore during the April-June quarter as compared to Rs 5,326.71 crore in the year-ago period.

To a query, Sekar said, "the slippages in the retail, agriculture, micro, small and medium enterprise is under control. Our profitability is not going to depend on increase in balance sheet size. I can do focusing only on NPA and NPA recovery", he said.

Meanwhile, Sekhar said Indian Overseas Bank is the State Level Banking Coordinator for the banks operating in Tamil Nadu on the Centre's goal to reach USD 5 trillion economy from the present USD 2.6 trillion.

Elaborating, he said the banking industry is taking up three level of interactions which include regional level, state level and the national level.

"This is a unique initiative.Earlier, banks used to learn from past mistakes. Now, we are learning from each other (one public sector bank to other public sector bank)," he said adding such an initiative was being held for the first time.

Some of the parameters taken up for the initiative was on how to increase digital penetration, how to increase credit flow to MSMEs, and how to align banking operation towards the objective.

Indian Overseas Bank conducted last week at the district level and a two day SLBC event was kicked off on Thursday.

"The National level meeting is expected to take place at a later date", he said.