The plan includes launching an infotech venture and a venture capital subsidiary, taking over a public sector bank, and introducing structured projects.

The term lending institution also introduced a new floating interest rate scheme with immediate effect. It has, however, refrained from cutting its prime lending rate even though ICICI has already effected an across the board lending rate cut a fortnight back.

IDBI has decided to launch its information technology initiative-IDBI Intech Ltd -- by next month. The institution is on the verge of tying up with an international infotech major for this venture which will have a corpus of Rs 100 crore has already shortlisted two public sector banks as possible takeover targets and is already in talks with the Reserve Bank of India and the Government to this effect.

"We might eventually acquire more than one bank. However, the acquisition may be total or partial-acquisition of only a certain number of branches, and will require RBI/government divesting its stake in our favour," IDBI Chairman GP Gupta said. "The infotech subsidiary will enable both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce transactions. It has been set-up in consultation with Arthur Andersen Consulting and its corpus will consist of Rs 75 crore equity and Rs 25 crore worth of preference shares. "The proposed infotech subsidiary will also explore the possibility of entering into a joint venture with an international financial services firm to offer it related services," Gupta said.

The DFI will also launch its venture capital subsidiary, a dedicated venture capital fund (VCF) for infotech, within the next few months.

E-commerce, Net forays on the cards
The DFI has drawn up a two-pronged strategy to enter into high growth infotech sector. "In phase-I, IDBI will concentrate only on the high-priority areas like e-commerce, shared services and IT services where IDBI can leverage on factors like domain/technical expertise, financial strength, brand image etc.

In phase-II, IDBI will concentrate on areas like internet access, product development/ customisation, implementation and training," an IDBI strategy paper said.