Bank of Baroda (NZ) will be officially inaugurated at the hands of Shri Namo Narayan Meena, India’s Minister of State for Banking and Finance, on February 4 in Auckland.
M D Mallya, Chairman and Managing Director of Bank of Baroda, the bank’s Indian parent, will also be present for the inauguration, which will take place at the bank’s swanky Dominion Road branch.
Bank of Baroda New Zealand became the country’s nineteenth banking entity after receiving a licence to operate from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand on September 1, 2009. It began operations on June 24, 2010.
With the formal inauguration next month, the bank will offer complete services including internet banking, the bank’s Managing Director Satish Vermani told Indian Weekender.
Bank of Baroda has its corporate headquarters in Mumbai. The bank was founded in 1908 in Baroda but was one of the earliest banks to have ventured overseas following the entrepreneurial Gujarati community around the world. Though new in this country, it has been operating in Oceania since the 1950s when it opened its operations in Fiji.
From humble beginnings, the bank has grown to emerge as an Indian financial powerhouse. It has a network of over 3100 branches in India. It has 78 overseas branches/foreign offices in 25 countries across 5 continents serving a global customer base of over 39 million. It has assets of over US$ 50 billion. Some 23% of the bank’s revenue comes from its overseas operations.
Bank of Baroda NZ’s state-of-art secure IT system is linked directly to its Indian branches and any money deposited in Auckland will be seamlessly available in any Bank of Baroda branch in India and vice versa. This is the reason why its leading personal remittance product Rapidfunds2India has been so popular with the NRI community.
The bank has planned a series of events around the formal inauguration on February 4.