Kolkata, July 23: The State Bank of India (SBI) is planning to open branches in Bangladesh and South Africa while proposing a slew of launches in the domestic market to benchmark itself and achieve world class levels of efficiency and service. Highly placed officials of SBI, the only Indian bank among the top 200 banks in the world and top 20 in Asia, said there were proposals for opening branches in Chittagong in Bangladesh, and Cape Town and Port Elizabeth in South Africa.
"Necessary approval in this connection would be obtained soon," the officials said.
The bank with a network of 48 overseas offices spread over 28 countries covering all the time zones, is also planning to upgrade its Sydney and Shanghai representative offices to full-fledged branches, they said. SBI had closed its Jakarta and Sao Paulo representative offices last year as part of restructuring.
The one at Moscow, however, was being upgraded to a full-fledged bank in participation with Canara Bank (holding 40 per cent share).
SBI chairman A K Purwar said it was being planned to position a large number of branches as `Super Shoppes` for distributing an entire range of financial products, including banking products. The bank was planning to integrate many of its functions with that of its seven associate banks focussing on technology, large value credit, business processes and to some extent treasury function. Bureau Report