Sean Nero

In­ter­com­mer­cial Bank Ltd (IBL) will open its fourth branch in Tu­na­puna by April, in­stall sev­er­al stand­alone ATMs across T&T and in­tro­duce linx cards as part of its strat­e­gy to bol­ster its cus­tomer base. So said Kr­ish­na Bood­hai, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor and chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer at the com­pa­ny.

In ad­di­tion, IBL in­tends to in­clude mo­bile and In­ter­net bank­ing ser­vices for its tech-savvy clients, while im­prov­ing the ser­vices for cus­tomers in pos­ses­sion of its visa in­ter­na­tion­al deb­it card. The in­tro­duc­tion of cred­it cards is al­so in the works. With the in­fra­struc­ture for these un­der­tak­ings al­ready in place, Bood­hai said the in­vest­ment was de­signed to move the bank from small to medi­um over the next two years, but he de­clined to re­veal cost of this ex­pan­sion project.

Speak­ing to the me­dia at Thurs­day's Cus­tomer Ap­pre­ci­a­tion func­tion held at the bank's In­de­pen­dence Square branch in Port-of-Spain, he made it clear that based on the lev­el of in­vest­ment re­quired, the bank was in a po­si­tion to com­fort­ably pro­ceed with its ex­pan­sion plan.

"We are very op­ti­mistic about fis­cal year 2013-2014 on the ba­sis of some of the pro­vi­sions in the na­tion­al bud­get. We are al­ready see­ing signs where a num­ber of cus­tomers are seek­ing to go in­to res­i­den­tial and com­mer­cial re­al es­tate based on in­cen­tives. Out­side of that we are al­ready see­ing a pick up on the con­sumer side for us and on the cor­po­rate lend­ing side," he said.

Bood­hai said they were see­ing, gen­er­al­ly, a will­ing­ness by cus­tomers to take risk in an­tic­i­pa­tion of the im­pend­ing growth. "The gov­er­nor of the Cen­tral Bank re­cent­ly in­di­cat­ed ex­pect­ed growth by about two-and-a-half per cent and we are op­ti­mistic that the econ­o­my will show pos­i­tive signs. We are al­ready in place to take ad­van­tage of that growth in the econ­o­my."