The Hindu Business Line : State Bank of Bikaner may hive off back-office work

Coimbatore May 11 While most banks plan expansion of branch network for better reach, State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, after consolidating its various processes, is trying to hive off back-office functions from core banking activities.

The bank has a network of 844 branches, all of which have been brought under the core banking solutions platform.

It has the clearance from the regulator for opening branches at Tirupur and Coimbatore among others and plans to open them soon and strengthen its presence in the South. `We will be opening our Regional Office in Chennai next month. Instead of adding branches, we would rather open more processing cells,' its Chief General Manager, Mr M. Ramaswamy, told Business Line.

Core banking

On the proposed decision, he said `we will need manpower if we add more branches to our network. But by imbibing technology and with our existing workforce, we will be able to serve customers better if branch staff are relieved of back-office functions and allowed to concentrate on core bank functions.'

It has opened a centralised business process re-engineering centre, an agri-processing cell, a cell for retail trade and trade finance. `We have hired premises and have identified the hardware and software for the centralised processing cell.'

On recruitment, he said the bank would look at roping in specialists in marketing and staff with specialised skills to operate at the counter. He, however, did not specify the number.

Rural focus

SBBJ has recruited 23 agriculture graduates and given each of them a monthly business target of Rs 1 crore. "We plan to concentrate on rural Rajasthan this year. We adopted 533 villages last year and are looking at adopting 600 more villages this year. All of this would be in Rajasthan, where the area under agriculture is increasing rapidly. We have issued over four lakh Kisan credit cards and restructured over 13,000 farm loans."

On business plans, he said "we have fixed the turnover target for 2011 at Rs 1 lakh crore".

This is about double the business volumes of Rs 49,246 crore it has achieved at the end of March 2006.

Mr Ramaswamy envisages the growth rate to slacken from the 38 per cent registered last year to just about 30 per cent this fiscal, because of the general market conditions.

"We are targeting 28 per cent growth in advances and 25 per cent growth in deposits this fiscal."