India

CIMB Group has entered into the Indian market with the opening of its Mumbai office.

Dip in bad loans and surge in interest income ushered the profit increase.

The lender minimises exposure to various projects and diversify risks.

The lender to acquire 30% of MetLife India Insurance to diversify its business.

The public sector bank eyes using Reg S bond in its first offshore bond offering.

While Indian BPOs have made some progress in tapping into lending operations, not much headway has been made in non-lending operations. Indian BPOs have also tended to stay away from voice-based work, which further limits revenues. Hari Rajagopalachari, ED for consulting at PricewaterhouseCoopers India, said that business processes have data and voice content, and regulatory constraints in offshoring data work are stringent. Also, a lot of banks have transaction banking and global trade processing as core service offerings handled out of their own offshore captives and do not see these as being candidates for outsourced offshoring. Deepak Patel, CEO of Aditya Birla Minacs, said that the amount of low hanging fruit is much lesser in the banking space as compared to the insurance sector for example, which involves huge volumes of transaction processing. In the insurance space, traditional BPOs have about 40% of the $9-12 billion market. Sameer Dhanranjani, country head, Fidelity National Financial, said that the employee skillsets for the BPO sector in a specialized domain like banking is still found wanting. Most BPOs are located outside of Mumbai where India's financial expertise lies. Indian BPOs have also not built technological solutions or platforms for the banking sector, he added. Though the banking sector has been slow to outsource its BPO work, BPOs are not ignoring the opportunities it presents. EXL recently closed a third party deal with a captive of a US-based bank; it declined to name the bank. Some companies like Genpact are aggressively looking for acquisitions in the banking space, others are organically building domain capabilities through hiring domain experts or building tools over existing solutions.

The lender seeks to get funds from Reg S bond, allowing it to be offered to overseas investors.

Infinia aimed to be issued to the by-invitation only to 5000 individuals that comes without spending limits.

The bank’s branch expansion plan will focus on 4 East African countries.

The move to fund loans in India after the lender suffered dip in its Q4 net profit.

Seshan will lead the bank’s push to promote its expansion across Britain.

The employees’ union wants to coincide strike with the opening of Parliament session in August to protest on

Sri Lanka's Monetary Board will include the China's yuan among designated currencies permitted for international transactions through banks in Sri Lanka.

The Bangladesh Bank made it mandatory for banks which want to finance the SME and agricultural projects to set up solar power panels for providing electricity.

Bank unions gave a strike call against India’s move to dilute its equity in banks and give foreign investors additional voting rights.

Inclusion of Bank of Rajasthan’s 450 branches into the network comprises a huge fraction of additional branches.