Speaking to The Financial Express, Corp Bank chairman and managing director Cherian Varghese said that the thrust area will be the application of technology.

"The bank will maintain its market lead, make itself user-friendly and stay ahead of its competitors. We know that the market has great expectations from us and we hope to live up to them and improve our shareholdings," Mr Cherian, who took over as the bank's CMD last Saturday, said.

Corp Bank has appointed the Chennai-based `Laser Soft Info Systems Ltd' as its information technology (IT) consultant for implementing 'Anywhere Banking' and `Net Savvy Solutions' for its Internet banking operations.

Commenting on the bank's tele-banking initiatives, Corp Bank's general manager R Balakrishnan said, "The pilot project launched in New Delhi has been operationalised in 16 branches and we have plans to extend it to 40 branches in the current year." Mr Balakrishnan further added, "The total number of computerised branches stood at 311 and covered around 78 per cent of the bank's business." Presently, the bank has networked about 461 branches through e-mail and is in the process of migrating to Microsoft Exchange (MS-Exchange) from Microsoft Mail (MS-Mail). The exercise is expected to finish by end- November. The upgradation will offer an advantage in that MS-Mail has limited application while MS-Exchange will cover the entire gamut of operations carried out by a branch.

Corp Bank's total advances as of September 30, 2000 stood at Rs 7,742 crore (excluding staff advances), of these, the retail lending outstanding make up Rs 535 crore. The bank is projecting total advances to go upto Rs 8,923 crore and retail lending to rise to Rs 700 crore. It has also improved upon and reviewed its Corp-Loan' schemes. Taking into consideration the higher outlay required for the construction and acquisition of house/residential flats in metro cities and other urban centres, the bank has raised the upper limit for the loan from Rs 25 lakh to Rs 50 lakh by the bank.