Bandhan Bank to set up fresh branch networks, to hire rural folks

Trust Chandra Shekhar Ghosh to think out-of-the box even while undertaking initial recruitment exercise for Bandhan Bank, being positioned as the country's first bank for the poor.

Even as graduates from the country's premier institutes such as Indian Institute of Management (IIM) or Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) queue up in droves eyeing the handful of position being sought by Bandhan, it would be predominantly people from the rural areas who would form the majority of the staff strength of the upcoming bank Bandhan Financial Services. The micro-finance outfit along with IDFC was granted provisional bank licence by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in April.

"We work predominantly in the rural areas, so it's where we would be drawing most of our staff from. Close to 70% of our 57 lakh customers resides there and we wish to continue serving them. The reason is our staff need to have a through understanding of the need, culture and socio-economic environment of the people they would be serving if we wish to meaningfully contribute to our customers. Also, it is difficult to retain staff if we send urban people to work in rural branches thereby creating problem in staff retention while a village folk would be too willing to serve in an urban branch," says Ghosh, chairman cum managing director of Bandhan.

On July 2, Bandhan invited applications with up to 15 years of experience in banking and human resource discipline and reportedly received close to 27,000 applications.

"For now, we would be restricting ourselves in recruiting for only the top positions as we have lot of work in hand. We are currently upgrading skills of our existing staff as we have to think about them also," Ghosh told dna.

Interestingly, one of Bandhan's first recruitment for the bank is a journalist. Tamal Bandyopadhyay, a veteran in the field who has been extensively writing on the banking sector, has just joined as an adviser, he said.

The newest challenge before Ghosh is that none of the existing micro-finance branches - numbering 2016 across 22 states - are fit to be upgraded as a bank branch.

"We have to set up branch network afresh even if it would involve significant investments," Ghosh said.

It is not just lack of infrastructure or the small size that makes these branches unfit but also their locations, a factor which has been studied in some details.

"The micro-finance branches were set up considering the ease of access and convenience of our customers all of whom are women. They would avoid bazars and other crowded places and would prefer their mohallah. But now our bank branches would welcome everybody who wish to transact business with our bank...which means it has to have a central location," Ghosh said.