The new concept, called "Call Centre", is proposed to be launched within a couple of months and is based on the belief that customers prefer to interact directly with their banker rather than a recorded voice.

Prabhu said modern banking methods require live interaction with the customer, besides giving him topical advice on personal investments and tax planning. The Call Centre would permit the bank to engage in "outbound" marketing of products whenever a customer calls up to transact business. The call would be used by the bank staff to offer suitable products to customers to meet their savings and investment goals, Prabhu said.

The basic features of the new technology include "automatic call distribution" and "computer telephony integration". The software willautomatically direct incoming calls to the person best equipped to deal with the particular customer. For instance, a Bengali customer would prefer interacting with a Bengali-speaking staff.

Computer telephony integration would record voice data and convert it into digital code that can be recognised by the computer. Each call and its purpose would be stored for future reference whenever the customer calls up again, thereby simplifying the processing of his job, Prabhu said.

Regarding the Y2K preparations of the bank, he said ICICI Bank is fortunate as its software was written much after the problem became known in the early nineties.

"Banks like ours are substantially less exposed to the problem. But we do encounter problems from unexpected quarters. We use relational databases and some of our utilities are not Y2K-compliant," he said.

According to him, the bank has consciously avoided a simplistic view of these problems and prepared a complete inventory of all its IT assets. Software has been gradedinto "critical, semi-critical and non-critical" categories. "Testing and validation of the systems are being done in-house and we have an internal group which monitors the progress on a weekly basis and reports to the board of the bank once every month," Prabhu said, adding that ICICI Bank's target date for Y2K compliance is September 1998.

The bank's capital adequacy has improved to 14.94 per cent as at end-June 1998, following a Rs 100-crore increase in Tier II capital via an issue of subordinated redeemable non-convertible debentures with a coupon of 13.5 per cent and a maturity of 63 months.

Mohan Shenoi, senior vice-president for resources and planning, said the bank's floating rate deposit scheme, which is about one-month old, has mobilised Rs 25 crore from corporates having short-term cash surpluses to park for 15 to 29 days.

He said the rate set under the scheme is changed daily on the basis of the Mumbai interbank offered rate or MIBOR. But investors are protected with a floor level of six percent even if the call rates fall below six per cent. Similarly, the scheme offers a cap of nine per cent.

Shenoi clarified that the success of the scheme would depend on keeping the basis anchor rates the same for both lending and borrowing purposes.