Guwahati, Dec. 4: Leading private sector lender Axis Bank is bolstering its digital banking initiatives for reaching out to customers in the semi-urban and rural areas of the Northeast.

"We are shifting our focus to digital banking as we look to make our services accessible across the Northeast. We have 70 branches in the region with a majority of them in the unbanked areas," Rajiv Anand, head (retail banking), Axis Bank, told reporters here today. "This year, we opened nine branches and plan to add at least 15 next year, most of them in the semi-urban and rural areas of the Northeast."

The third largest private sector bank, Axis, has a 16 million-strong retail customer base. As many as 47 per cent financial transactions by individual customers during the past six months have been through digital channels.

"We expect to grow (in terms of transactions through digital banking platform) by 20 per cent this fiscal," he said.

Among its digital services, the bank offers Aadhar-based e-KYC mode of paperless account opening service through micro-ATMs, Swipeon, a mobile phone-based card acceptance service, Instant Money Transfer, an instant remittance service and Axis Mobile 2.0, a mobile app.

"Since our inception in the Northeast in 2002, we have experienced significant scale of business across products," Anand said.

Across its branches in the country, the bank has seen an additional 80,000 customers per month. "In the Northeast, additional customers per month would be between 5,000 and 6,000," Biplabi Patnaik, vice-president and circle head (Northeast), told The Telegraph.