The Hindu Business Line : Canara Bank to expand branch network

Bangalore, Nov. 13 Canara Bank plans to open 210 branches across the country by end-2009. With these, the bank hopes to cross the 3,000-branch mark this year. “We have 185 licences for 2009-10 from the Reserve Bank of India, and about 25 carried forward from last year,” Mr H.S. Upendra Kamath, Executive Director, Canara Bank, told Business Line.

Besides domestic expansion, Canara Bank also plans to open a branch at Leicester, in the UK by February 2010, and a representative office at Sharjah this month.

“We do have approvals for 8-10 overseas branches from the RBI. But we are going slow now,” said Mr Kamath, adding that the bank would look at opening these branches “as and when things improve”.

According to him, Canara Bank has recruited 800 clerical staff, 400 officers, 500 marketing officers and 100 specialists this year.

Financial inclusion

On the bank’s financial inclusion drive, Mr Kamath said that there are plans to extend its financial inclusion initiative to the north, east and western belts. “We have plans to cover 15-20 centres.” The bank, which has 19.5 lakh no frill accounts, has deposits worth Rs 382 crore in these ‘Can Saral’ accounts. In 26 lead districts, the bank has 100 per cent financial inclusion and about 1,086 farmer clubs have also been formed to disseminate information on financial products to unbanked people.

Credit cards

The bank has credit linkage with 2.34 lakh self-help groups, with an outstanding funding of Rs 746 crore, and an exposure to micro-finance institutions to the tune of Rs 211 crore. Canara Bank has issued 1.21 lakh general credit cards, “with an aim to give credit to people for employment in a gainful way, generate income and pay interest”. The bank has disbursed about Rs 251 crore of credit through the general credit cards.

On the agricultural lending side, Canara Bank has issued 28.55 lakh kisan credit cards so far, with an outstanding credit of Rs 3,500 crore as of September 2009. The target is to issue “250 new cards per rural and semi-urban branches per year,” said Mr Kamath.

Canara Bank has not adopted the banking correspondent model “in a big way yet”, he said adding that as a pilot project, the bank has employed about 50 banking correspondents.