Indian Bank on a drive to empower staff

KOLKATA: Call it the internal empowerment of knowledge in the days of fierce competition among banks along with self-monitoring of accounts.

Indian Bank has tied up with US-based international agency Casad to make its front-office employees relevant in various aspects of banking. The bank has also employed TCS to introduce an anti money laundering software in some of its branches.

Also as part of its preparation for Basel 2, which will be applicable to the bank from next year, Indian Bank has roped in credit rating agencies to assess all kinds of small and large markets and operational risks of the bank.

“We feel that all our employees should be knowledgeable to handle various aspects of competition. The international agency Casad has prepared a list of 42 banking topics to include almost all aspects of banking transactions like derivatives, treasury, credit etc”, M S Sundara Rajan, chairman and managing director, Indian Bank said.

“In an e-learning format, employees are expected to read up and arm themselves with all this knowledge to remain relevant and tackle customers themselves”, he said.

Sundara Rajan was in the city to attend the 100th State Level Bankers Committee meeting here on Wednesday.

On the technology front, the bank expects to put all its 1476 branches under the format of core banking solution (CBS). Currently, 1234 of its branches are on CBS.

According to the chairman, the bank is adequately capitalised and there are no plans to raise capital. It has also taken a conscious decision to not to increase its high cost deposits, which are around Rs 7,000 crore.

It has targeted to increase its core deposits, around Rs 45,000 crore by 20% in the current fiscal. Advances are slated to grow by 25% in 2007-08. The total balance sheet size is estimated to be around Rs 94,000 crore this fiscal.