Yes Bank to open Hyd branch by month-end

Yes Bank, which entered the capital market with an initial public offering of 70 million equity shares, will be tying up with a private non-life insurance company within a month's time. This apart, it will be opening its branch in Hyderabad by June-end.

Speaking on the sidelines of a press conference here on Thursday in connection with its public issue, H Srikrishnan, executive director, Yes Bank, said that they were in the advanced stages of tying up with a private general insurance company.

"We had earlier tied up with Max New York Life for life insurance and have already started booking business in this sector," he added.

Yes Bank has two branches "� at Mumbai and Delhi "� and has got licenses to set up 28 more branches. "Of these, we will be setting up seven including the one at Hyderabad by June-end. The work on the Hyderabad branch at Raj Bhavan road is already going on," Srikrishnan said.

The remaining branches will be set up by March 2006. The bank will be setting up branches in Chennai, Gurgaon, NCR, and Jammu and Kashmir by this year-end.

Yes Bank will also increasingly focus on the retail sector besides wholesale banking and therefore not only provide the general services in the form of savings accounts and fixed deposits but also wealth management. Its target client base will be the affluent and mass affluent people.

The bank has also outsourced applications management, IT infrastructure and network management to Wipro.

"This will save us from investing in IT infrastructure since we can outsource it to Wipro according to our needs. We believe that this will result in a cost reduction of around 35 per cent in the long run as it is on a pay-by-use basis," Srikrishnan said.

Yes Bank's IPO that opened on June 15 has already been oversubscribed nine times. The qualified institutional buyers (QIB) portion has also been subscribed over 18 times. The issue closes on June 21, 2005.