People's Bank to go hitech with e-banking in 2006

by Hiran H. Senewiratne

Chairman of the People's Bank Dr P.A. Kiriwandeniya said the Bank's is now in the process of introducing internet banking, phone banking and SMS banking next year in a bid to make the bank of the most state-of -the-art bank in the country.

The Bank's IT developed services are sensitive. We want to promote the Bank as an IT savvy bank. We have now included IT in the core-banking solutions including Electronic payment gateways with existing system.

We will link 200 branches next year, another 300 branches in 2007 to it," he said in an interview with the Daily News.

"The Bank has already completed a four-year development plan from 2001 to 2004.

Now we have launched the second phase of our development plan from 2005 to 2008, which is now in progress. The total development plan broke into four years," he said.

The A.C. Neilson survey report in 2002 shows that the People's Bank is the most visited bank in the country. "Our urban area branches are still most profitable and those branches bring a lot of revenue to us. Therefore we are quite comfortable in the urban areas. The Bank started 40 years ago to mainly help the rural sector and we are still concentrating on these areas to eradicate rural poverty in the country," he said. Excepts from the interview. Question: How are you going to continue the Bank's restructuring programme?

Answer: We don't use the word "Restructure" which gives a wrong connotation to the public.

We will not privatise the Bank whatsoever. We will focus on adding new technological capabilities and customer base and IT capabilities with proper HR policies to provide a better service to the nation.

Q: Do you have any plan to increase number of branches apart from the 617 existing branches and pawning centers in the future?

A: No. We want to consolidate our branch network first and end of this year we will link 200 branches under the core-banking solution.

Q: As we know certain businessmen take loans from Bank by using the political clout and they default the repayment losing a colossal amount of money to the Bank. How are going to tackle that situation?

A: It is really a legal issue. Our legal department gets clearance to get legal action without any discrimination on our non-performing loans. I would like to mention that the Bank's past dues rate is less than six per cent, except for a few hardcore cases.

Q: The Bank has recently announced to implement a core-banking solution at a cost of US$ 10 million, which empowers core-banking solution across branch network what is your response of it? The Bank sources say that a large number of employees are going to retire from the Bank. How are you going to recruit new staff and do you have any mechanism to do that?

A: We have a mechanism to outsource new staff, which is mainly university graduates. At present 1000 graduates work as trainees and we have a training centre to train such people. We will fill gaps when vacancies arise which will happen time to time. The recruitments will continue only to fill gaps.

Q: Last year the Bank has recorded a net profit after taxation of Rs. 2.195 billion and is the best performance recorded in the history of the Bank. Are you confident to achieve that trend in the coming year?

A: This year also we are optimistic and our development performance was also good. We are sensitive to market changes and we are proactive and we are trend creators in the sector. We will be building on that.

Q: The Bank expects to raise nearly 700,000 ATM cards with visa debit and also all ATM's will be visa enabled before this year. How are you going to facilitate the programme?

A: It is really technology transformation. We are on schedule. Our branch network and high profile customer base will help the Bank to serve the customers better than other Banks. We have a business plan to broadbase the Card Centre while developing card operations with new options and facilities.

Q: How about overseas customer services, which brings considerable amount of forex to the country.

A: We have an overseas customer unit that deals with foreign remittances, NRFC accounts. We add value to this hard earned money.

We give attractive interest rates. A lot of employees in the Middle-East benefit out of that.