Growth push: South Indian Bank to focus on retail loans, savings a/cs

South Indian Bank plans to focus on retail loans as well as improve its share of low-cost savings accounts.

Identifying the need to provide a full suite of products for retail customers or run the risk of losing them to other banks, VG Mathew, MD and CEO, said the bank was gearing towards improving its performance on these parameters.

The Thrissur-headquartered bank will shortly be inaugurating a centralised marketing and processing centre at Kalamassery, a suburb of Kochi. Its retail loan hub will also be shifted there within the next few months.

The centralised cell will enable the bank to open new customer accounts quickly and ensure compliance with KYC (know your customer) rules, thereby, freeing branch officers from routine tasks.

The bank’s CASA (current account, savings account) stands at 22 per cent, which Mathew admits is low by industry standards and needs to improve considerably.

He said the bank will be identifying one person in every branch (822 branches) for marketing. That person will be taken out of routine branch work and asked to reach out to more customers. Nearly 1,200 people were recruited for this purpose last year and placed in various branches, he said.  

These efforts are already beginning to show some results and will be more significant in a year from now, he said. Home loans, for instance, rose to ₹2,241 crore in June 2015, a growth of about ₹632 crore, or 39 per cent, over the year-ago period. Auto loans too have shown similar growth rates although from a lower base, he added.

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