Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Wednesday launched the ICICI Bank’s ‘Branch on Wheels’ in Odisha here which is a part of the bank’s financial inclusion plan that aims at providing banking services in villages having no banking facilities. Bank Executive Director (Retail Head) Rajiv Sabharwal was present on the occasion along with other officers of the bank.
Patnaik said this unique initiative would help provide basic banking services in the remote unbanked villages.
later, Sabharwal, in the presence of the bank’s General Manager Anirudh Kamani who is heading the operations in Eastern India, told reporters that the Branch on Wheels services would be operational in Sundargarh and Ganjam districts immediately and would cover other districts later on. Odisha is the third State where the bank has rolled out this service after Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh.
The Branch on Wheels is a van that functions as a bank branch by offering a wide range of banking products and services such as savings accounts, loans, cash deposit/withdrawal, account balance inquiries, statement printing and funds transfer/DD/PO collections, among others.
The van is equipped with a two employees, GPS tracking system, laptops with 3G connections, lED TV, a safe, a printer, public announcement system, an UV lamp that detects forged cheques, a note counting-cum-authentication machine that identifies fake currency notes and a unique low-weight ATM. The bank plans to operationalise 20 such vans in near future after fine-tuning the scheme.
The bank, which has an extensive network of over 200 ATMs in Odisha and 80 branches, plans to add another 40 branches soon. It now has presence in 27 out of 30 districts of the State. It has reported a credit-to-deposit ratio of 63 per cent in the State.