Beefing up the retail portfolio, stepping up recovery and giving an increased thrust to Oriental Bank of Commerce's CASA (Current Account and Savings Bank Account) deposits will be some of the key priorities of the bank's Chairman and Managing Director, Mr Nagesh Pydah, who assumed charge about five months ago.

In an exclusive interview to Business Line , Mr Pydah discusses the roadmap of growth for the bank.

How do you foresee the growth in retail portfolio of your bank?

Our bank's retail portfolio stands at about Rs 8,000 crore as on March 31, 2011 and accounts for 12 per cent of our total advances. We want to grow our retail book by about 50 per cent during the current year and housing will be our thrust area. We have identified 600 branches across the country which is credit intensive for home loans. Home loans currently account for almost 75 per cent of our total retail portfolio at Rs 6,000 crore. We want to take it to Rs 9,000 crore by the end of this year.

How do you see your CASA deposits growing?

CASA will be our focus area moving forward. It currently accounts for 24.8 per cent of our total deposits; we want to take it to 26 per cent by this year end and 30 per cent within the next two years.

What is your roadmap for recoveries?

We have drawn up an action plan for recovery of bad assets to the tune of Rs 1,200 crore during this year. We do not intend to sell our bad assets to the asset reconstruction companies, instead we intend to upgrade our own recovery system. Last year our NPAs were about Rs 1,200 crore, and we had to make hefty provisioning. The gross NPA as on March 31, 2011, was Rs 1,920 crore or 1.98 per cent of our loans.

Are you looking at making an overseas foray?

We have a representative office in Dubai and we have applied to the Reserve Bank of India for upgrading it into a full fledged branch. We are not in a hurry to foray into the overseas markets. We will first study the market and avoid regions where other Indian banks already have a sizeable presence. We will preferably look at emerging markets such as Africa and Tanzania in the due course of time.