Syndicate Bank and United India tie up
Chennai: Syndicate Bank is to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with United India Insurance to sell the latter's policies, most probably in the month of May. The bank was likely to tie up with another general insurance company to sell its products, and had sought the Reserve Bank's permission to start a subsidiary for the purpose. Insurance regulations do not permit a company to sell more than one company's policies at a time.

Speakng at a press conference officials said that the bank hoped to do more than Rs 80,000 crore (Rs 64,330 crore) of business in the current financial year. The bank also planned to open three overseas representative offices (South Africa, Dubai and Singapore) and focus on retail advances.
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SBI to expand global network
Kolkata: The State Bank of India, India's largest commercial bank expects to add 10-15 more offices abroad, in all the neighbouring countries as well as others. It has recently started a new office in Bangladesh, its second in that country.

The bank is expected to announce an 18 per cent increase in deposits and a 16 per cent increase in credit. The retail-lending figure will also record an improvement. It also hoped to record a decent increase in its project finance portfolio.
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Indian Bank net doubles
Chennai: Indian Bank's net profit for the year 2003-04 has more than doubled to Rs 405.75 crore, from Rs 188.83 crore for 2002-03. The bank's operating profit rose by 36 per cent to Rs 802.46 crore from Rs 590.25 crore previously.

The bank has also recovered Rs 320 crore from accounts classified as `non-performing'. In the current year, the bank expects that more cash recoveries from major default accounts would happen. The bank has three big NPA accounts, each upwards of Rs 100 crore. Net NPAs have come down to 2.71 per cent from 6.15 per cent last year.

During 2003-04, the bank's turnover (deposits plus advances) increased to Rs 45,379 crore from about Rs 40,000 crore in the previous year.
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Share Microfin declares dividend
Hyderabad: Share Microfin Ltd (SML) has posted an income of Rs 24.70 crore and a profit of Rs 3.8 crore during 2003-04. SML is a community owned Micro-finance Company with 26,000 poor women as shareholders.

The company's board has declared a dividend of 10 per cent, claiming to be the first micro-finance company in the country to do so.
The company serves 2.5-lakh poor women and has disbursed Rs 366.27 crore. The average share holding of the women in the company is Rs. 5,000.
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