City Union Bank launches Facebook banking
City Union Bank on Wednesday launched its new initiatives in social media banking and also reported its second-quarter profit, which rose 17% to Rs 144.75 crore from Rs 123.74 crore on the back of higher retail banking.”We introduced a slew of new digital initiatives.
One is our online loan application on our customers CUB net banking account. Customers can avail of this instant loan with a few clicks. Another initiative is that customers can check their account balance and transfer funds through Facebook. We are quite excited about this as it brings us closer to customers as we use social media for banking,” said N Kamakodi, CEO, City Union Bank.
City Union Bank customers can visit the bank’s Facebook account and click on the send message link to get their enquiries for account balance and online transfer done. The bank has also introduced clones of the robot CUB Lakshmi at five other branches in Chennai.
“We have now enhanced the robot’s natural language processing capabilities. CUB Lakshmi can now serve tier-II and tier-III customers in Telugu, Tamil and English. CUB Lalskhmi is also equipped to handle other queries such as balance enquiry, cheque book request, submission of Form 15-G/H, raised by our customers,” said Kamakodi.
CUB’s Q2 profit
For the second quarter, the bank’s total income grew 11.3% to Rs 996.12 crore from Rs 894.86 crore in the previous year. Retail banking, which forms nearly 55% of the bank’s revenue stream, jumped 11% to Rs 544.93 crore from Rs 487.83 crore in the previous year.
Corporate banking grew 10.2% to Rs 243.59 crore from Rs 220.91 crore, while treasury grew 10.8% to Rs 204.49 crore.
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Total expenses grew 2.72% to Rs 676.06 crore from Rs 658.12 crore. Net interest income — the difference between what the bank pays out as interest on deposits and what it earned from loans — moved up by 17.8% to Rs 354.84 crore from Rs 301.21 crore.
The bank also nearly doubled its provisions against loan losses to Rs 129.29 crore from Rs 67 crore. Gross non-performing assets (NPAs) as a percentage of advances worsened to 3.07% from 2.69%.
Net NPA worsened to 1.76% from 1.63%. The bank’s capital adequacy as on September 30, 2017 was 15.31%, well above regulatory requirements.
CASA deposits grew by 21% as on September 2017, which is 23% of total deposits. “CUB has performed well in a challenging environment faced by the banking sector. Steady growth in advances and a significant growth in net interest income enabled us to post a sizeable profit for the quarter,” said the CEO.