ICICI Bank to employ 50,000 people in next five years
New Delhi: The ICICI Bank group, which includes banking, insurance, securities and other financial services, is likely to directly employ 25,000 people and another 15,000 indirectly, every year for the next three to five years, a bank official said. The group has some 50,000 employees on its direct payroll and another 1,00,000 are indirectly employed as insurance agents and people working under service providers.

The group may hire about 15,000 each year for the next three years for insurance and securities broking businesses as these sectors are growing fast.

ICICI Prudential Life Insurance and ICICI Lombard General Insurance are leaders in the private space in their respective field and are growing by 80-100 per cent year-on-year.
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DSP Mutual Fund to launch capital protected fund
New Delhi: DSP Merrill Lynch Fund Managers plans to launch a closed-ended capital protected fund by the end of this year to tap investors who want assured returns.

A draft offer document in this regard would be filed with the SEBI soon. The fund is expected to be available for subscription by December.

The capital protected fund is generally a close-ended fund that offers full protection of the capital at maturity. However, in case of an early withdrawal the investor gets only the current NAV of the units back without the guaranteed element.

The scheme can offer different investment terms ranging from three to five years or more. The money raised is normally invested in government securities.
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PNB likely to achieve business of Rs2 lakh crore in Q2
New Delhi: Punjab National Bank (PNB) may achieve a total business (deposits and advances) of more than Rs2,00,000 crore in the second quarter this fiscal. The city-based bank is expected to announce the financial results for the June-September period by October-end. The total business of the bank stood at Rs1, 94,719 crore at the end of June 2006.

PNB is growing by over 20 per cent year-on-year and is likely to raise Rs 2,000 crore through bonds in the remaining part of this fiscal to provide capital for business expansion. The bank is likely to launch a new product in November that will enable its customers to buy and sell shares online.

At present, the bank only offers de-mat account services, but to transact in shares its customers go to other banks. PNB has tied up with IDBI Capital to offer the facility.
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Prudential's captive arm to hire more
Mumbai: PPMS, a captive BPO arm of the UK-based insurance and financial services company Prudential, is opening a new facility in Vikhroli with a capacity of 600 seats. The facility will start operating early next year. The company's employee base is around 1,350 and the new facility will add another 700 recruits to PPMS.

Currently, the firm has about 700 people working in its Vikhroli office. The company will invest around £6m in the new facility.

PPMS started operations in '03 with low-end voice related work being offshore to India by the parent company Prudential from UK. The parent company has two customer support centres in Europe.

PPMS is now offshoring more and more complex work here. As of now, voice contributes only 30 pc to the total PPMS India business while the rest comes from the non-voice segment.
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