Paras Ra­moutar

Bank of Bar­o­da (T&T) Ltd has reg­is­tered 85 per cent growth in to­tal busi­ness in 2010, ac­cord­ing to Yesh Pal Chhabra, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor. The Bank of Bar­o­da (T&T) Ltd cel­e­brat­ed its fourth an­niver­sary on Oc­to­ber 17. "We did ex­ceed­ing­ly well in 2010 by reg­is­ter­ing 85 per cent growth in to­tal busi­ness of the bank against flat growth reg­is­tered by the bank­ing sec­tor in T&T," Chhabra said in an in­ter­view. He said dur­ing the cur­rent fi­nan­cial year, the Bank of Bar­o­da re­port­ed in Sep­tem­ber 2011 a growth of eight per cent as the bank­ing sec­tor had neg­a­tive or neg­li­gi­ble growth in de­posits and loans."Our for­eign ex­change busi­ness is in­creas­ing at a good pace and it would dri­ve prof­itabil­i­ty of the bank in the cur­rent year. Our loan schemes are equal­ly pop­u­lar, and they are get­ting pop­u­lar among busi­ness­men whose sales are af­fect­ed by slow­down of the econ­o­my, but have good worth." He said that the banks are not get­ting fresh busi­ness due to de­pressed mar­ket con­di­tions, al­ready af­fect­ed by the slow­down of the econ­o­my of the Unit­ed States and the Caribbean, and now by the state of emer­gency in T&T.

Im­ped­i­ments to ef­fi­cien­cy

The Bank of Bar­o­da is now fi­nal­is­ing its sec­ond five-year plan. "There are good op­por­tu­ni­ties in T &T for ex­pan­sion and we will short­ly take our de­ci­sion in this re­gard. There is need for im­prov­ing tech­nol­o­gy-re­lat­ed ser­vices, but the slow speed with which things move here is un­for­tu­nate. "We could get LINX af­ter con­stant fol­low-up of three years, while and for the au­to­mat­ic clear­ing house (ACH), we are still strug­gling to get this, de­spite years of fol­low-up with the rel­e­vant gov­ern­ment agency." Chhabra said once its tech­nol­o­gy needs are sort­ed out, the bank will in­tro­duce fur­ther ser­vices, like In­ter­net and mo­bile bank­ing sys­tems and the pro­vi­sion of US dol­lar loans at "low­er in­ter­est rates." "Our de­ci­sion to come to T&T was based on sev­er­al ac­tors and not just the com­mer­cial one. How­ev­er, be­ing a com­mer­cial one, we saw the op­por­tu­ni­ty to do good busi­ness and I would say that our par­ent com­pa­ny in In­dia took the right de­ci­sion to es­tab­lish here. It's just a mat­ter of chance that soon af­ter es­tab­lish­ing the first branch, there were eco­nom­ic cri­sis world­wide and, like oth­er banks, and economies of the world, this coun­try was no ex­cep­tion," Chhabra said. In 2009, the Bank of Bar­o­da opened branch­es in San Fer­nan­do and Ch­agua­nas.

'It took guts to call state of emer­gency'

Yesh Pal Chhabra said the present state of emer­gency is the last re­sort for deal­ing with the law and or­der sit­u­a­tion, and is a wel­come step. "For decades, the peo­ple are be­ing used for deal­ing with the law and or­der sit­u­a­tion. The wors­en­ing crime sit­u­a­tion is a known fac­tor for dis­cour­ag­ing busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ties in the coun­try and scar­ing the peo­ple from mov­ing freely. It ap­pears that this ex­treme step had be­come in­evitable, and the Gov­ern­ment showed guts to chal­lenge the sit­u­a­tion head on by de­clar­ing the state of emer­gency." "Thus, even though the eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ties, in­clud­ing the bank­ing sec­tor have been bad­ly af­fect­ed for the present, let us hope that the crime sit­u­a­tion will be con­trolled by this mea­sure and the eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ties will be re­vived short­ly. The con­fi­dence of the com­mon peo­ple, in­clud­ing the busi­ness­men will be re­stored."