Indian Banks Must Aspire To Join Top Global League: Chanda Kochhar
ICICI Bank's global footprint consists of subsidiaries in the UK and Canada, branches in the U.S., China, Singapore, Bahrain, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Qatar and Dubai International Finance Centre, and representative offices in UAE, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia. The bank's UK subsidiary has established branches in Belgium and Germany.
Asked about the plans to bolster ICICI Bank's domestic business to cater to growing international ambitions of Indian companies, Ms Kochhar said, "We are an Indian bank offering globally-benchmarked products and services.
"Our international book continues to be about one-fourth of the total assets. We continue to offer technology driven solutions for greater convenience to our retail customers.
"At the same time we continue to support Indian corporates for their overseas investments through our overseas branches as well as banking subsidiaries."
Talking in detail about ICICI Bank's international business strategy, Ms Kochhar said, "ICICI Bank has an international presence for quite some years through its representative offices, branches and banking subsidiaries.
"The bank's international banking strategy is to focus on capturing trade and investment flows with India and the rest of the world as well as being the preferred bank for NRIs in key global markets."
On repatriation of funds from its UK and Canada arms, the ICICI Bank chief said that the banks keeps looking at optimising its capital in each market as per business needs, and the repatriation of capital from our subsidiaries in UK and Canada has been part of its strategy to optimise the capital in these subsidiaries.
"Both these subsidiaries continue to have strong reserves and a high capital adequacy even after the capital repatriation," she said.
On exit from Russia, Ms Kochhar said the sale of the banking subsidiary in Russia "facilitated an exit from a market with limited growth opportunities and will help us redeploy the capital for optimum returns".
Read More: On Modi Trail, Gujarat CM Scouts For Investments In China
