Bottom line to dictate business at Bank of India: Rajneesh Karnatak

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Bank of India is shifting its focus on lending with higher profitability even if it means giving up some opportunities where earnings are next to nothing, said CEO Rajneesh Karnatak. In an interview with Joel Rebello, he said although there are risks building up in some segments of retail loans, they are just transitory and banking can only get better as economic prospects improve. Edited excerpts:Bank of India has just gotten out of its worst phase with the return of profits and falling bad loans. Where does it go from here? In any transaction, or business we are doing, we are trying to make commercial sense out of it, whether it is on the credit side or while taking deposits.

We want to build on our 44% CASA (current account and savings account) and then retail term deposits. Our big advantage is that bulk deposit is only 12% of total liabilities. Thirdly, we want to improve our retail, MSME and agriculture lending to 55% of our book by March 2024.

Fourth, we want to improve our slippage ratio and do recovery more aggressively. Lastly, we want better non-interest income. These are the basic things we are concentrating on.What have you done, or doing, to achieve them? Branches will now have powers to sanction loans only up to ₹10 lakh, all others will be through the underwriting process.

Eighty per cent of the loan book will be through the underwriting offices or through the large corporate and mid-corporate branches. Nearly 800 offices will be controlled by the head office directly. We will shortly float RFPs (Request for Proposals) for consultants to bid for human resources transformation.Almost every bank wants to grow only in retail. It sounds like a decade ago when everyone wanted to do infrastructure. Is there a