Indian Overseas Bank (IOB), a public sector bank, is striving to improve its retail book and is focussing energies on growing it even as the bank is on a consolidation phase, a top official said.

“Our aim is to grow the share of retail in our overall lending to 20 per cent from current 16 per cent in a year," R Subramania Kumar, Executive Director, IOB told BusinessLine here.

By end March 2018, IOB should be able to achieve this milestone given its increased focus on retail segment now, said Kumar, who is holding additional charge as MD & CEO.

IOB, whose CASA deposits has seen a sharp growth from 31 per cent to 36 per cent post demonetisation, is not looking to add more branches to its network, he said.

However, efforts are on to improve its digital offerings to help grow its retail businesses.

NPA recovery Subramania Kumar said that the primary focus of the bank is to reduce non-performing assets (NPA) and that recovery effort is now a top priority for this lender.

“The bank’s aim now is to recover more and more from our NPAs", he said.

As a conscious strategy, IOB is not looking to lend more to large corporates, which already accounts for a lion's share of its overall loan book.

Sound capital Stating that IOB was not in a tight position as regards capital, he said that the bank was having a "fairly good" capital adequacy ratio of 10.78 per cent.

Subramania Kumar also said that IOB was not looking to raise capital from the market anytime soon. The bank was hopeful of receiving from the government the second tranche of ₹1,500 crore (out of the ₹3,100-crore allocated to it for 2016-17) this quarter, he added.

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