Mangalore-headquartered private sector lender Karnataka Bank has launched initiatives to boost current account, savings account ratio to 30 per cent from present 25 per cent by end of the current fiscal.
The campaign has been introduced for three months to increase the share of CASA in a bid to decrease the cost of deposit for the bank.
“As per the initiative, we aim to add five lakh new accounts that will push both our customer base and CASA ratio,” Jayarama Bhat, managing director of Karnataka Bank said.
He also said that the bank would aggressively look at young and salaried customers as per this initiative.
Karnataka Bank has also recently introduced KBL- Vanitha for women customers which provides Rs 50,000 insurance cover to the account holder.
“We also have KBL- Tarun and KBL Kishore for young customers and we are hopeful of getting encouraging response from this segment under our new initiative,” Bhat said.
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He also said that the bank was investing in technology to attract young customers.
The private sector lender is also aggressively pushing salaried accounts to increase the CASA ratio in the overall deposit book.
“Salaried accounts are another segment of focus to push CASA ratio,” he said.
However, the bank is not taking the route of branch expansion for pushing for low cost deposit and is actively looking at new customer addition in its existing branches.
“Though branch expansion is one way of increasing the low cost deposit base, we are now concentrating to consolidate our business in our existing branches,” Bhat added.
Karnataka Bank has registered a 76 per cent rise in its net profit to Rs 28.72 crore during July-September period of this financial year on the back of higher core earnings.
The bank's total revenue also showed a 16 per cent rise to Rs 635.44 crore during this period as compared to Rs 548 crore posted in the same period last year.
Operating profit of the bank also posted a more than 11 times rise to Rs 76.68 crore in the second quarter as compared to the same period last year.
Total advances of the bank reached Rs 15,683 crore by the end of September quarter, up by 26 per cent over the same period last year.
Similarly, the deposit of the bank registered a 16 per cent rise to Rs 25045 crore during the second quarter against Rs 21582.12 crore last year.
The bank has 465 branches along with 227 ATMs as of now. It plans to expand the branch strength to 480 along with 300 ATMs by end of this fiscal.