Mumbai: The Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) plans to open a fourth branch in India at Gift City in Gujarat as it sees customers building their operations at the international financial services centre, said a senior executive.
Lisa Vasic, managing director of transaction banking at ANZ, said in an interview that the bank sees plenty of opportunities in India, where it serves some large institutional clients. Vasic is in charge of the bank’s trade and supply chain, payments and cash management, and its cross-border correspondent banking business. The bank had an aggregate exposure of ₹19,421.3 crore as of 31 March 2023, according to regulatory disclosures.
“We are focused on supporting our customers and where they want us to be, so we are looking into setting up a Gift City branch. Our customers are going to have operations in Gift City and that’s where we want to be to support them and their flows,” Vasic said.
ANZ, which re-entered India in 2011 after exiting the market a decade earlier, has one branch each in Mumbai, Gurugram and Bengaluru. Its global capability centre in India is spread across two locations in Bengaluru. In Mumbai, the lender recently moved into a 11,000-sq-feet office at Worli, where British lender Barclays has been reported to have recently leased 64,000 sq ft of space. “The economic situation in India is trending strong and this relocation underscores our growth ambitions in India, where we have operated our ANZ India branch for 13 years,” said Vasic.
Once the branch is operational, ANZ will join a growing number of foreign banks such as JP Morgan and Citibank that have opened branches at Gift City.
“This India trip is about the growth story of India and how we can support our customers both here in India and across the region, specifically on the back of the free trade agreement that was signed in 2022 between Australia and India,” said Vasic. He was referring to the India-Australia Economic and Cooperation Trade Agreement which, according to a government statement in December 2022, provides an institutional mechanism to encourage and improve trade between the two countries.
Vasic said another reason for her India trip was to meet some of the bank’s key customers and hear from them about the current opportunities and challenges in the world’s fifth-largest economy.
“One of the key things we have heard so far — it has been consistent across meetings — is around growth opportunities and some of the significant transformation that has been undertaken here in India, whether it is UPI, the Made in India strategy, or around infrastructure,” said Vasic.
Vasic said clients have told her during her trip that the business environment in India has changed for the better over the past five to eight years, leading to an improvement in how business is done here. That said, liquidity remains a challenge and that is something that clients have also highlighted, she added. “I think with the growth, obviously the access to liquidity is probably becoming a lot tighter. I had a number of meetings where that was a consistent thing,” she said.
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Published: 16 Feb 2024, 05:41 PM IST