IDFC Bank goes live with 'soft launch' of 23 branches

Mumbai: IDFC Bank Thursday went live with a "soft launch" at 23 locations, including 15 branches in rural Madhya Pradesh, becoming the 91st scheduled commercial bank in the country.

The bank, which is aiming to be a 'hatke bank' with a stress on technology, has started operations in corporate and wholesale banking, rural banking and treasury verticals as part of the launch.

The bank management had last week announced that personal banking business, where it will compete entrenched lenders for a share of low-cost deposits and retail advances in the cities, will formally start from January next year.

To start with, the city-headquartered bank, which has its genesis as an infra lender, has 1,200 employees across all of its verticals.

It was selected along with micro-lender Bandhan in the last round of award of licences. Bandhan started operations in August with a network of over 500 branches.

IDFC's branches are located in Indore, Hoshangabad, Harda and Khandwa districts of Madhya Pradesh, while it has seven branches undertaking corporate and wholesale banking functions in Pune, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad, its official website said.

It has a solitary personal banking branch operating out of company headquarters in the BKC business district in central Mumbai.

As per the announcement made by its executive vice chairman and managing director Rajiv Lall at an event last week, it is offering a savings account interest at the minimum 4 percent prescribed by the regulator for deposits up to Rs 1 crore.

However, for saving bank deposits of over Rs 1 crore, the rates have been fixed at 6 percent.

The base rate is at a competitive 9.50 percent, while the one year deposit rate is at 8 percent, the website said.

Senior citizens shall be eligible to get an incentive of 0.50 per over and above the card rate for term deposits, it added.

As part of the personal banking proposition, the bank is also offering free transactions at any bank's ATMs, free fund transfers, free debit card for lifetime and no charges for any transactions except when cheques bounce, it said .

Last week, the bank had said that the legacy wholesale and corporate banking business will be the profit centre initially, while the most number of customers will come from personal banking.