According to a senior BoB official, Arthur Andersen and KPMG are in the race to acquire the mandate for offering advisory services to the bank. "The international consultant will advise us on the specialised area we should look into and also suggest a joint venture partner," said the official.

This was disclosed at a press meet organised by the bank on Wednesday to highlight the achievements of BoB under the chairmanship of K Kannan, who will hang up boots on November 30. On January 1 next year, Kannan will take charge as the director of Indian Bank Personnel Selection Board (IBPS).

"As director of the board I will try to find out new talents in the banking sector and recommend top level recruitments in the public sector bank," Kannan said.

According to Kannan, the bank has registered a substantial growth in the advances in the last two month. During the current fiscal so far, advances have grown to Rs 2,000 crore, of which Rs 791 crore has been registered in the last two months.

According to Kannan credit growth is expected to go up by 10-12 per cent in the fiscal 2000. Highlighting bank's performance in the last five years, Kannan said the bank has managed to turnaround its foreign operations from a negative growth of 14.48 crore in March 1995 to Rs 109.38 crore in March 1999. "Last year 26 per cent of the bank's profit was contributed by its foreign operations," Kannan said.

The bank has decided to close one of its branches in the United Kingdom (UK) as it is marginally contributing to profit. With the closure of the branch, in UK BoB will have seven braches. About 8-10 employees are serving in the branch. "The bank has framed a redundancy programme for all the employees of the branch. Some of the employees will also be relocated in other bank branches in the nearby area," said a bank official.

The bank has also identified 440 loss making branches out of 2,654 branches within the country out of which some are totally unviable branches. The bank has formed an internal group which is studying the prospect of turning around these loss making branches. "We will either merge the loss making branches or turn them into satellite branches depending on their performance," he said.

Under the on-going voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) for public sector banks, in the last one year over 250 employees of BoB have subscribed to the scheme.