Indusind Bank to accelerate branch expansion

Indusind Bank Ltd has announced its intentions to aggressively expand its branch network of 147 branches to 180. The new branches will strengthen the bank's pan-India presence, as it already has a presence in 24 states.

The bank has received a fresh authorisation from RBI for opening 19 more branches, in addition to the 21 licenses that it had received during this calendar year.

While it has opened seven branches, the remaining 14 are scheduled for launch before March 2007. With this new set of licenses, the network will now increase to 180 branches by March-April 2007.

According to Bhaskar Ghose, managing director and chief executive officer, "This new set of 19 branch licences over and above the existing ones will help country wide expansion, especially in the North East region. We already have 87 off-site ATMs and licences for 100 more have been received very recently."

Ghose also said that it had arranged with the State Bank of India and its affiliate banks and the MITR consortium for shared access to their 15,000 ATMs for Indusind Bank customers.

"We are now also a part of NFS network of IDBRT (RBI) which enables our customers to have access to ATMs of 23 member banks. Our expanded reach will provide a big boost to our Retail Banking operations, which remains a focus area for our Bank," Ghose added.

He also said, in addition to its own representative office in Dubai and London the bank has a preferred partnership with reciprocity of business flows and promotion of each other's banking services with Union National Bank in Abu Dhabi in the UAE and Doha Bank in Qatar.

The reciprocal business covers banking services, including deposit accounts, remittance business, loans, wealth management advisory, distribution of third party products, trade finance, global banking, and investment banking including corporate finance.

In addition, the Bank also has arrangements with seventeen exchange houses from the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman to provide convenient, cost-effective, and quick funds-transfer facilities to NRIs.