DBS Bank floats local arm, aims to triple business

Mumbai: Singapore headquartered DBS Bank on Monday announced the launch of its locally incorporated wholly owned subsidiary, DBS Bank India (DBIL) along with plans to scale up operations. The bank intends to establish over 100 customer touch points —a combination of branches and kiosks—across 25 cities in the next 12-18 months. Currently the bank operates out of 12 cities and in March this year, it would open 9 branches.

With DBIL, DBS will accelerate its growth plans, expand its operations and build greater scale in India through a "phygital" model to further serve large corporates, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and individual customers.

"We felt that a presence in 12 cities is not enough and therefore applied for subsidiarisation to expand. Currently our balance sheet is Rs 50,000 crore and we intend to triple it in the next five years," said Surojit Shome, chief executive officer of DBS Bank India.

"Currently the business is skewed more toward corporate loans while consumer business is less than 10 per cent and the aim is to get the share of retail business, both on liability plus asset side, to about 30 per cent of our revenue and profitability. In the next three years, corporate loans would constitute 40 per cent, while SME and consumer loans would be 30 per cent each" added Shome.

DBS Bank so far has put in Rs 7,700 of capital, including Rs 1,800 crore it invested in calendar 2018 and would be spending another Rs 125-150 crore in expanding the network.

Speaking about profitability Shome said, "Last year we had a loss while this year we hope to close the year with a marginal profit and from hereon our profitability will go up and in the next 5-7 years we could catch up with the Group's return on equity level."

To advance its digitalisation and innovation thrust, the bank set up its largest technology and operations hub outside Singapore, DBS Asia Hub 2 in Hyderabad, in 2016.