SHILLONG: In what can be termed as a historic moment, two banks-Vijaya and Dena bank have merged into the Bank of Baroda thus making it the second largest nationalized bank of the country.
Addressing a press conference here in the city on Monday, Deputy regional Manager of Bank of Baroda, Shantanu Mukherjee said that the merger had taken place to streamline the banking sector in the country as per the recommendation of the Narasimham Committee of 1991
The three banks would now be known as the Bank of Baroda and it has over 9500 branches with 13400 ATMs and 85, 000 employees in the country
The banks serve over120 million customers with a total business of over Rs. 15 lakh crore, Mukherjee added.
According to Mukherjee, with the move there will be no changes in the staff setup and all the employees of the three banks would be retained and there would be no retrenchment.
It was also informed that customers of the three banks would be using the same accounts, passbooks and debit-credit cards and there would be no change as of now.
Reacting to a query about its northeast plans, Mukherjee said that two regional head offices are likely to be opened in the region and presently the Bank of Baroda and the Vijaya Bank have their regional head offices in Guwahati.
On being asked about the low credit-deposit ratio in the region, Mukherjee and the bankers said that the ratio was poor due to less industrialisation in the region.
Informing that the C-D ratio is about 20 per cent in the northeast, while the countries average is 70 per cent, he added that they are trying to improve this ratio,” he added.
The Bank is also contemplating to open its branched in unbanked areas of the region based on the experiences of the three branches since they already have branches in some of the remote corners of the region.