Uco Bank chairman and managing director V. Sridar (left) in Calcutta on Thursday. Picture by Kishor Roy Chowdhury

Calcutta, Oct. 5: Uco Bank is trying to catch up with the retail lending boom. The city-based bank today inducted a dedicated sales team that will cater to retail and small enterprises customers at its Calcutta regional office. Uco Bank’s own employees make up the team.

The bank had taken the retail lending initiative six months ago with the launch of exclusive retail lending centres in other regions and cities.

“We introduced this initiative in Calcutta now because we wanted to shift our regional office to another location where we can have more space to accommodate more people,” Uco Bank chairman and managing director V. Sridar said.

“However, we launched the initiative for small enterprises in other regions only a couple of months ago,” he added.

The bank has also instituted a standard, rule-based loan appraisal system. “All these initiatives aim at reducing the number of days between application and sanction of a loan to seven days,” Sridar said.

The bank had appointed Boston Consulting Group to suggest a roadmap for the future course of business. According to its recommendation, Uco Bank used its excess manpower in creating dedicated sales force for the retail and small enterprises sector.

“Till now, we have set up 20 centres backed by 128 sales persons who will look after retail businesses and 17 centres with 101 sales persons exclusively for small enterprises. In the next two months, eight more small enterprises centres will be opened. Each sales person in the retail team have been given a monthly target to mobilise business worth Rs 60 lakh, while the target for each of the small enterprises sales force is Rs 1 crore. In the last six months, the two sales teams together have generated a business of Rs 267 crore and we expect they will be able to achieve Rs 500 crore during the current financial year,” Sridar said.

The bank plans to set up 55 such dedicated centres before March next year and increase the strength of the sales force team to 450 from 229 at present.

“We have decided to increase the share of our retail portfolio to 35 per cent of our total business in three years from 19-20 per cent at present,” Sridar said.

Till September end, Uco Bank’s total business stood at Rs 97,062 crore, of which deposits accounted for Rs 56,402 crore and advances at Rs 40,660 crore. “We are targeting a total business of Rs 1,10,000 crore during the current financial year,” Sridar said.