And Banks to Shine Herafter

Lohit Bharambe and Abhishek Kumar together work on this exhaustive report elaborating and justifying why finally ‘acche din’ for banking sector has arrived. They also put some words of advisory for retail investors who have their interests in the banking stocks and also the ones aspiring to own some.

- Lohit Bharambe & Abhishek Kumar

The 25th most powerful woman in the world is highly stressed these days but still happy as her bank collected a massive deposit amounting to over Rs one lakh crore in last 10 days. She has another reason to be happy as stock of the country’s largest nationalised bank has gone up by 10 per cent in less than a fortnight since demonetisation was announced by the Prime Minister on November 8 night. Chairman of State Bank of India (SBI), Arundhati Bhattacharya in her early sixties believes the demonetisation move by the government will benefit the banks immensely even though at this time banks are working over-time in a chaotic scenario.

Her counterpart in United Bank of India (UBI), Pawan Kumar Bajaj also has a reason to smile after months of sleepless nights while working on the NPA menace and bringing the black numbers down. While Bhattacharya says her bank will handle demonetisation efficiently and so far has been doing so, Bajaj claims demonetisation process actually had kicked off way back in 2014. “A series of events since August 2014 actually led to this demonetisation. First the government pushed the banks to give bank accounts to all unbanked till then, and thereafter, ATM and debit cards were handed over even to account holders with zero balance accounts,” Bajaj explains. Bhattacharya says, ”things will turn better by end of November and as we are flooded with deposits, obviously the rates will fall from here.”