Public sector lender Bank of India (BoI) will be setting up 250 more branches and 2,000 ATMs across the country in the current year, according to its executive director, MS Raghavan.
At present, the bank has 4,020 branches and 1,700 ATMs. It has an employee strength of 46,000 and its volume of business crossed Rs 600,000 crore last year.
Raghavan said the bank was expecting a credit growth of 18 per cent this year as against a growth of 6-8 per cent registered during the last fiscal.
He, however, said the credit offtake was sluggish at present and BoI’s credit growth during the first quarter of the current fiscal was only 6 per cent.
Though he did not foresee any improvement in the situation in the current quarter, he was hopeful that interest rates might come down by about 50 basis points by the end of this year.
For the quarter ended June 30, BoI posted a 71 per cent rise in net profit to Rs 887.45 crore compared with Rs 517.53 crore in the same quarter last year.
Its gross non-performing assets during the period stood at Rs 6,752 crore.
