Icici Bank Linking Up With Boi For Indiacard

ICICI Bank is tying up with the Bank of India (BoI) for marketing IndiaCard, the credit card of BoI. P H Ravikumar, executive vice president (treasury and forex), ICICI Banking Corporation Ltd, told Business Standard in Calcutta on Tuesday: We will sign the memorandum of understanding with Bank of India within the next three months. We are working on the terms of revenue sharing between ICICI Bank and Bank of India before we finalise the agreement.

Ravikumar said that ICICI Bank would have had to set up elaborate infrastructure in terms of skilled personnel and equipment to provide the credit card service to its customers.

This would have been an expensive and time consuming exercise. The tie-up with Bank of India will enable ICICI Bank to offer the facility of a credit card to its customers, without incurring substantial expenditure.

ICICI Bank, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI), is going public soon with ICICI offering 25 per cent of ICICI Bank shares to the public. The issue opens on August 5 and closes on August 11.

The employees of ICICI group have already picked up 12.48 lakh shares on June 23, 1997 at Rs 35 per share, thus reducing the holding of ICICI in ICICI bank to 99.24 per cent.

After the public offer, the holding of ICICI will further fall to 74.24 per cent, on a capital base of Rs 165 crore.

The shares are priced at Rs 35 each and the total number of shares being offered is 4.13 crore, the aggregate value of shares being Rs 144.38 crore.

ICICI Bank, which started commercial operations in June 1994, made a net profit of Rs 40.13 crore in 1996-97, up from the Rs 17.11 crore net profit made in 1995-96.

The ratio of net NPA to net credit is 1.9 per cent only, while the capital adequacy ratio is at a comfortable 13.04 per cent. The bank has 24 branches and two extension counters at present, which it plans to increase by another 18 branches in the current fiscal.

ICICI Bank plans to introduce a number of innovations in its services in the current fiscal, with Internet banking and telebanking to be launched very soon. The earnings per share of ICICI Bank stands at Rs 2.68 on March 31, 1997.

The bank has a projected its profit after tax for 1997-98 to be Rs 55.08 crore.