Vysya Merges 6 Regional Offices In Recast Plan

Vysya Bank Ltd as part of its restructuring exercise, has merged six regional offices and will be opening 30 branches, including extension counters, in the next three years.

The bank's regional offices have been merged with offices catering to common areas in the country.

At present, number of branch offices at the bank stands at 11, while the number of branches including extension counters stands at 484. Vysya Bank aims to create a presence in the top 100 business centers in India. Till now the bank has its presence in 70 business centres. In the pipeline are branches at Salt Lake in Kolkata, one in Siliguri and another in Jamshedpur.

 

Majority of the regional offices merged were in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, bank officials said.

Vysya Bank is the only exception among the Indian banks which, in spite of surplus manpower, did not declare any voluntary retirement scheme. Surplus employees, as a result of the merger, were retrained and relocated to other branches and regional offices.

With the restructuring in place and delegation of power, officials at bank branches and regional offices, at the point of origin of business, will be able to take independent business decisions, which were taken only at the corporate level, pre-restructuring.

Meanwhile, corporate banking has also emerged as a thrust area at Vysya Bank and vice-president, corporate banking, K V Kustagi, hopes to register a 30 per cent growth in disbursement over the previous year in the sector.

Vysya Bank plans to take a focused approach to get into consortium type of lending for top corporates. Profit in the sector is also expected to grow by 27 per cent. "We will now try and rope in large corporate clients," said Kustagi.

"The Reserve Bank of India's norm to include commercial borrowings and other instruments while calculating capital adequacy ratio (CAR) will help us in roping in clients from banks which have weak CAR," said bank officials.

"We have also focused our operations on forex advisory services, forex treasury, cash management and funded and non-funded operations," he added.

Vysya Bank is also in the process of increasing its banking operation time to 12 hours and remain open for seven days a week at a few locations. In fact, the branch at Salt Lake in Kolkata, scheduled to be operational by November, will operate 12 hours a day for seven days a week.