Public sector lender Indian Bank is planning to nearly double the number of its overall business correspondent (BC) outlets in the country to 20,000 in the next two years from 10,750 as on March end, the bank’s project head for selection of corporate business correspondents Sujay Kumar told FE.
“We are going to expose API (application programming interface) through which a lot of companies will be onboarded and a lot of financial services products will be routed through BC points,” he said. “Manipal Technologies is one of our partners and they have been given more than 630 plus BC points, and it will increase regularly as per demand,” he added.
The lender’s strategy is in line with other PSBs, who are aggressively increasing their reach in semi-urban and rural areas through BCs. Punjab National Bank, for instance, almost doubled its BC outlet network from 12,831 in December 2021 to 22,607 in December 2022.
Similarly, Bank of Baroda (BoB) has increased its BCs from 29,000 to around 52,000 in just one year. Canara Bank, which had 8,906 outlets in March 2022, has grown its network to almost 14,000 outlets.
Indian Bank’s renewed thrust on expanding its business correspondent network is due to a rising number of people in remote corners wanting to have door-step banking, instead of travelling miles to find a bank branch, Kumar said. With rising digitisation, the brick-and-mortar model of banking will no longer suffice customers’ expectations, he said.
Rajalakshmi Raghu, head of strategic relationships at Manipal Technologies, said that the company has a network of over 7,500 trained BCs across the country. Of these, over 630 outlets will be deployed for extending Indian Bank products, she said.
Some of the services that are delivered by these outlets include enrolment and opening of savings account, basic bank accounts, PM Jan Dhan Yojana and other deposit products such as fixed deposits and recurring deposits.
The BC outlets are also trained in extending loans and sourcing leads for kisan credit cards, agricultural loans, gold loans and housing loans. Further, transactions services include Aadhaar-Enabled Payments System and card-based deposits and withdrawals, fund transfer through IMPS, mobile and Aadhaar seeding, balance enquiry and mini statement and facility of passbook printing.
Going ahead, BCs can also cross-sell health and bike insurance and mutual funds to customers, among other products, Kumar said.