With a view to make banking more accessible in the rural areas, Punjab National Bank (PNB) is planning to introduce door to door banking facility shortly. Aiming to have 100 million account holders within five years, the bank is making efforts to establish 50,000 touch points across the Indo-gigantic basin and to achieve 100% financial inclusion of all the districts.
Interacting with FE on the sidelines of 102nd meeting of state level bankers’ committee (Punjab), KC Chakrabarty, chairman and managing director, PNB said that the bank has already implemented 100% financial inclusion in nine districts of Punjab and another 12 districts will be covered under the scheme by March this year. He informed that the banks in the state has already opened 3,19,965 accounts and provided financial assistance to 13,544 beneficiaries under GCC scheme. Expressing concern over the stagnant growth rate of Punjab as compared to other states, Chakrabarty said, “We need to reach out to the villages and make banking more accessible. We have more than 12,000 villages in Punjab and only 1,200 rural branches, so there is an immense scope of exploring this area. Keeping this in mind we will soon be launching door to door banking service for rural areas. We have plans to launch 12 pilot projects in the northern region, out of which 3 have already been introduced.”
Emphasising upon the need to link all the branches through core banking solution, Chakrabarty informed that all the branches of PNB will be linked by the end of this fiscal year.
“We will also introduce core banking in all the branches by March 2009,” he said. He added further, “Our focus will be on agriculture, SME sector, education and retail. We are also making a foray into the overseas market. We’ll be launching our branch at Hongkong by the end of January. New subsidiaries will be opened in Canada, Dubai and the Shanghai subsidiary will be revamped. After that we’ll target Singapore and other countries.”
The bank has already spent about Rs 500 crore on the process of making the branches technically advanced and an incremental cost of Rs 300 crore is expected further. “It is estimated that in establishing about 50,000 touch points, an investment of upto Rs 500 crore will be required. We will open 100 new branches by the end of next fiscal year and about 70% of them will be located in north. We are also aiming to bring our net NPAs below 1% by 2009,” he added.