PUNE, Jan 1: Over 100 senior bankers, insurers, financial sector regulators and finance ministry officials would attend the two-day meet here beginning tomorrow to deliberate on host of issues including merger and acquisitions and bad assets to revitalise the banking sector.
On concluding day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the meet Gyan Sangam, a retreat of chiefs of financial institutions.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha, RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, Secretary Department of Financial Services and other senior officials of the department would be attending the meeting.
Heads of PSUs banks such as SBI chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya, Indian Bank’s T M Bhasin, Bank of India chairperson V R Iyer and Corporation Bank CMD S R Bansal will attend the meet.
Besides top bankers, IRDA Chairman T S Vijayan and PFRDA chairman Hemant Contractor would also be present.
“The retreat will start at 1.30 pm on January 2, 2015. After the introductory session where objectives of such an exercise are explained, there will a session on best practices where outstanding work done by banks will be showcased,” official statement said.
The second day would begin with regular sessions at 9 am with a talk by Swami Sukhbodhanandji on ‘Leadership and Change Management’.
Mergers and acquisitions of PSU banks will be a major theme at the ‘Gyan Sangam’. The first of its kind retreat of bankers and insurers to be held here will also deliberate on financial inclusion and direct benefit transfer scheme, two focus areas of the new government.
There will also be sessions by experts, including global consultancy firms, group discussions, sharing and demonstration of best practices and technologies.
The retreat will end with presentation of a draft action plan to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the second day.
The Prime Minister will be interacting with chiefs of financial institutions at the ‘retreat, which is being organised to find out “what has gone wrong and what should be done both by banks as well as by the government to improve and consolidate the position of PSBs.”
The consolidation of PSU banks have been pending for long and has not made any headway despite various reports advocating merger of various small PSU banks.
There are 27 public sector banks, including five associates of State Bank of India.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in hist first Budget speech in July had indicated government’s intention on merger and acquisitions of public sector banks.
“There have been some suggestions for consolidation of public sector banks. Government, in principle, agrees to consider these suggestions,” he had said.
Besides CMDs of the banks, the executive directors of the banks would also be present.
“The final objective would be to prepare a blue-print of reform action plan, once adopted which could then be implemented by the banks as well as by the Government,” official sources said.
Also efforts would be made to seek “out-of-box” ideas from prominent experts and from top-level managers attending the retreat.
The other topics of discussion will include financial literacy, priority sector lending, interest subvention and human resource.
Total Gross Non Performing Assets (NPAs) of public sector banks stood at over Rs 2.43 lakh crore as on end- September 2014.
The top 30 NPAs account for Rs 87,368 crore ie 35.9 per cent of total gross NPAs of PSBs.
At the same time there would be deliberation on resource mobilisation by these banks to meet global capital adequacy norms.
Public sector banks require equity capital of Rs 2.4 lakh crore by 2018 to meet Basel III norms. For the current fiscal, the government has allocated Rs 11,200 crore for bank capitalisation.
There will be a talk on financial architecture of MSME by ICICI Bank Chairman K V Kamath, who is also heading a committee on the same subject.
Other experts include HDFC Bank Deputy Managing Director Paresh Sukthankar, former Axis Bank chairman P J Nayak, Sebi Member S Raman, RBI Director Nachiket Mor.
The second day session would showcase the ‘best practices’, including that of Axis Bank Mobile Youth account, a retail product design based on life insights, an official statement said.
IDBI Bank’s electronically secured bank and treasury receipts payment system and SBI’s specialised cadre IT function have also been selected as best practices for discussion, it added. (AGENCIES)
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