The current rising rate scenario hasn?t really deterred public sector banks (PSBs) from going for an aggressive customer acquisition drive.
According to A Krishna Kumar, MD, State Bank of India, the country?s largest bank has 26 crore accounts and 17 crore customers. ?We are adding 2-2.5 crore accounts per annum. We have account opening campaign at our bank. We have got account opening centres so as to expedite the process of account opening,? he said.
While the SBI had only four such centres earlier, it is now planning to open more centres at 14 of its regional offices by September. Also, SBI is increasing the number of networks it has at regional level.
?We have already segregated a new network in Madhya Pradesh circle, which is necessitated by the merger of our own arm, State Bank of Indore. Now, we are looking at repeating the exercise in states like Andhra Pradesh,? Kumar said.
At present, the bank has 29 networks and has plans to increase it to 35 by the end of the financial year. SBI is also making efforts to improve its customer services. ?If the customer is happy, it will definitely help grow the bank?s business. Huge queues at bank branches is one of the major reasons for customer?s complaints. We are trying to introduce queue management system (QMS). We are also working on the introduction of customer relationship management (CRM) which is a part of our ongoing enterprise data warehouse project,?? Kumar said. IBM is implementing data warehousing project for SBI.
Canara Bank wants its customer base to increase by 20 lakh in 2011-12. S Raman, CMD, Canara Bank, said the bank?s current customer base stands at 3.8 crore and it has plans to increase it to 4 crore by the end of this financial year. ?Customer acquisition is a continuous process. We have started various campaigns which include special savings campaign and loan drive among others. We are providing special incentive for opening current and savings bank accounts,? Raman said. The bank is also looking at increasing the number of SME and agriculture accounts. ?At present, our Casa comprises 30% of our entire deposits. We are looking at increasing it to 40% by the end of this financial year,? Raman added.
MV Nair, CMD, Union Bank of India, also said that the bank has an aggressive plan for customer acquisition. ?We are looking at various models to tap different types of customers. We have observed through a study, which was assigned to McKinsey, that the bank should focus on young customers,? Nair said. The bank currently has customer base of 3.5 crore.
N Seshadri, ED, Bank of India, said that the bank has got a customer base of 4.6 crore. ?We are likely to add 1 crore new customers during this financial year. Essentially, we are looking for savings and retail customers. We are focusing on attracting customers from educational institutions. We have tied up with a large number of institutions for this. We are issuing Bingo Cards to our student customers which serves various purposes of financial requirements for them,? Seshadri said. He added that the bank has already opened 8-9 lakh such accounts so far.