SHILLONG: Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank have been merged with Bank of Baroda making it the second largest nationalised bank of the country.
Addressing a press conference in the city on Monday, the deputy regional manager of Bank of Baroda, Shantanu Mukherjee, said the merger “is to streamline the banking sector in the country as per the recommendation of the Narasimham Committee of 1991”.
The three banks will now be known as Bank of Baroda and it has over 9,500 branches with 13,400 ATMs and 85,000 employees in the country.
The banks serve over 120 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.
Customers of the three banks will use the same accounts, passbooks and debit and credit cards.
Reacting to a query about its northeast plans, Mukherjee said two regional head offices are likely to be opened in the region and presently Bank of Baroda and Vijaya Bank have their regional head offices in Guwahati.
On being asked about the low credit deposit ratio (CDR) in the region, Mukherjee and other bankers said it was due to less industrialisation in the region.
Informing that CDR is about 20 per cent in the North East while the country’s average is 70 per cent, he added that they are trying to improve this ratio.
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.
