ICICI Bank 2012 Annual Report Download - page 42

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Money2India – the flagship brand of the remittance business completed a decade and reached the
landmark of serving a million people. Through our branch in Frankfurt, we launched a dedicated online
Money Transfer to India service for Indians living in the Eurozone countries, thereby expanding ICICI
Bank’s international reach significantly.
Rural & Inclusive Banking
In accordance with the ICICI Group’s vision of combining a sustainable business model with a social
and human development agenda, ICICI Bank has undertaken several initiatives to meet the financial
requirements of the rural and the semi-urban population. These include offering credit through branches
and financial inclusion through business correspondents (BC). During the year, we continued to focus
on improving our product and service offerings to meet the requirements of all participants in the rural
and semi urban economy including farmers, small processors and agri-corporates. We also sought to
identify and capitalise on business opportunities across agriculture & allied and other sectors in these
geographies.
In March 2010, our Board approved a three-year financial inclusion plan that envisaged the opening of
no-frill savings accounts and expanding our rural reach over the next three years along with the provision
of credit to select individuals in the target segment through various product lines such as kisan credit
card, farm equipment loan and loan against gold ornaments. In fiscal 2012, we focused on building
capacity and deploying adequate resources to achieve these targets. We focused on opening accounts
for routing benefit payments under various government schemes and have received mandates for
opening accounts of individuals under these schemes in certain states. At March 31, 2012 we had 17
business correspondents with a network of 4,653 customer service points, to service these customers.
We provide additional services to these customers such as remittances and opening of fixed/recurring
deposit accounts. We had opened about 9.8 million financial inclusion accounts by March 31, 2012.
We have successfully launched the process for routing government benefit payments using the Aadhar
platform of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on an end-to-end basis. This includes
crediting beneficiary account using Aadhaar Payment Bridge System (APBS) and disbursements in the
field using AEPS. We have also been appointed as registrar by UIDAI.
We have also built lending capability in over 1,000 of our branches for products targeted towards
customers in the rural and semi urban areas across different segments in the entire agri-value chain. We
have designed a bouquet of products customised to meet the specific requirements of the customers in
these areas. These products are designed to meet the working capital and investment requirements. We
also increased our product offerings by way of strategic tie-ups with tractor manufacturers, associating
with certain corporates/cooperatives in the sugar/dairy sector and financing self help groups to reach
out to the weaker sections of the community. New product initiatives were also undertaken during the
year to enhance credit flow towards the micro and small enterprises sector.
Going forward, we will focus on leveraging our branch network and the network of our BC partners
as dedicated channels of customer service. We will also continue with our endeavour of ensuring
enhanced financial inclusion by offering quality banking facilities to the unbanked, use of technology for
addressing customer needs and growing our relationships with these customers over time. We will seek
to play a significant role in the channeling of payments under government schemes to the beneficiaries
through their bank accounts with us. We will also leverage the emerging initiatives and infrastructure,
such as the Aadhaar initiative which support the financial inclusion initiative in the country.
Treasury
Our treasury operations are structured into three verticals: proprietary trading group, customer related
markets business and the asset-liability management group.
Fiscal 2012 was a volatile year for financial markets. The government bond markets saw an increase
in 10-year yield from 7.98% to 8.57% following tight monetary policy (with repo rate increased by 175
basis points) in fiscal 2012. This was accompanied by tight liquidity conditions. The equity markets
Business Overview