Banking mergers must translate to customer benefit

Monday, 3 February 2014 01:45 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

The City of Colombo has 282 bank branches, with ongoing competition among the institutions to have more, bigger and ‘fancier’ branches. (In this same geographical domain, there are only 47 supermarkets!) This requires multiple layers of DGMs, AGMs, regional offices and managers, branch managers and escalating infrastructure costs to maintain such

an extensive branch network. This translates to high costs that depositors and borrowers have to pay by way of ‘fat’ margins that bank operate on. The prudent endeavor by the Central Bank to drive consolidation should challenge banks to think and act ‘lean’ and translate the benefits to the end customers and drive the economy. Hope we can ‘bank’ on this!