Tata
Industries eye banking infrastructure business
15 November 2006
"We
want to enter the banking infrastructure sector in a
big way... construct a chain of ATMs and money boxes
and lease them to banks," Kishore A Chaukar, managing
director, Tata Industries Ltd, said in Chennai. "We
are talking to RBI, which has so far not allowed non-banking
companies to enter the sector," he added.
Banking
infrastructure is a new thrust area for Tata Industries,
one of the two holding companies of the Tata Group. It
focuses on investments in new and high tech areas.
Chaukar
said that some of the banks, with which Tata Industries
discussed the idea, had shown interest in the initiative.
"There is no strong ideological resistance to ownership
of banking infrastructure by a non-banking institutions,"
he said.
Though
RBI doesn''t allow non-banking institutions or corporates
to own banking infrastructure, these are expected to materialize
in India in four or five years, he said.
He said electronic money boxes, manned by the security
agencies, could be installed near commercial establishments
for depositing cash and could be linked to the bank''s
servers so that cash deposited in the boxes could be credited
into the accounts.
Currently,
cash machine in the country can handle only two or three
categories of currencies. Tata Industries is also in discussion
with IIT-Madras for developing machines that can handle
about five categories of currency notes, he said.
Another
group company, Tata Card, would be launching loyalty cards,
he said, adding that Tata Industries was tying up with
some leading companies to award loyalty points for using
the cards. "It is not a credit card," he clarified.