State Bank of India (SBI), the largest public sector bank of the country, plans to invest Rs 500 crore-Rs 1,000 crore in the general insurance business in synergy with Insurance Australia Group. The Chairman of the bank, O P Bhatt, said that SBI would keep the 74 per cent stake while 24 per cent would be kept with the private partner. The entity would be named as the SBI General Insurance.
“We will make a soft launch with some products later this month and a complete rollout will be done in the next year,” he said. He added that since they need complete infrastructure for launch the entire basket of products, they would wait for the complete network to come in place before the final launch.
In the beginning they can take the help of agents to deal with the retail consumers in the market.
He apprised the bank has sufficient liquidity and capital adequacy ratio of 14 per cent. He added there was no dearth of funds with the bank so there is no plan to raise any capital from the market in the current financial year.
He said the business of bank was not effected by the slowdown in the economy. The recoveries were effected only from export oriented small and medium enterprises.
Bhatt said the bank presently offers mobile banking to over 200,000 customers and was in a process to strengthen its software to extend mobile banking to a larger number of customers.