The first two regional offices, which will commence operations within a month, will be located at Chennai and Calcutta and will cater to the needs of the southern and the eastern regions, respectively. The next two in the pipeline are the New Delhi and Mumbai regional offices to be followed by ones at Guwahati, Lucknow and Hyderabad.

This is the first time the IIB will be fanning out operations on its own -- all along, it had been operating through 150 surrogate sub-centres manned by commercial bankers who functioned with IIB support. The regional offices, which will now be manned personally by IIB officials, will each oversee the sub-centres falling within a particular region, and provide educational services, library facilities and other benefits tomember bankers on an interactive basis. The increased interaction and greater personal contact that will result are expected to be much more effective and improve the quality of services being offered by IIB, which is the nodal agency for conducting post-recruitment banking examinations in India.

In fact, in keeping with contemporary needs, the institute is already in the last lap of a tie-up with the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) for an MBA programme for its members. The tie-up is aimed at benefiting bankers who have not had the privilege of attending a business school. On the anvil is also a high-level banker-educationists conference -- the third of its kind -- slated for the last week of September at Mumbai.

The conference is expected to identify issues and concerns of bankers. The three main issues on the agenda will concentrate on the strengthening of IIB's activities, its future diversification, and enabling better co-ordination between bankers' training institutions such as IIB,National Institute of Bank Management, Bankers' Training College and others.

The IIB has been going ahead for some time now with a package of reforms based on the recommendations of the report of the expert group on syllabus revision. The expert group was chaired by K Kannan, chairman, Bank of Baroda.

This had become necessary because of a growing perception that the CAIIB examinations did not serve the purpose of contemporary banking in its present form. In keeping with the Expert Group's recommendations, the consolidated two-part CAIIB examinations will be split up into two separate examinations -- JAIIB and CAIIB -- from December 1998. The syllabus also introduces graded specialisation from the JAIIB stage right up to the advanced diploma level. For the first time, the institute will also provide study material at the enrolment stage, instead of keeping it optional as before.