Said UTI Bank's vice president for marketing, Mr Hemant Kaul: "This is being done with the objective of aiding our customer acquisition. We strongly believe that ATMs will give us a very strong cutting-edge, and cost-benefits... and the cost of servicing customers will come down."UTI Bank had 69 ATMs as on March 31, 2000. It has increased to 200 ATMs as of now. The Bank is of the view that ATMs are currently the channel that has the maximum potential for growth.

The Bank claims that it had seen major shifts happening in the customer behaviour: seventy-five per cent of payments happening are through ATMs. Compared to the level of cash withdrawals through ATMs in March, the rate of increase in October is over 200 per cent. The number of transactions that took place during this period have gone up by over 175 per cent. On an average, the Bank witnesses 100 transactions per ATM every day."When seen from the point of view of the customer, the ATM still remains the channel with the highest potential if we factor in the cost to the customer. With ATMs, the number of clients coming in have increased manifolds", Mr Kaul said.

Added Mr Kaul, "We are not limiting our ATMs to cash payments only, but are upgrading the ATM services to include activities such as balance enquiries, cheque book requests and the like, which will help us leverage the investments that we have made in our ATMs, help us get additional customers and also increase the fee-based income that the Bank gets today." UTI Bank had 49 branches in March 2000. As of now, we have 66 branches and hope to have close to 93 branches by the end of this year.

The Bank's efforts in the coming six months will be geared towards shifting or migrating its business to self-service channels - besides the ATM to the Internet. The branches network would be used for complex transactions and high-network clients. A little down the line, the Bank plans to set up a `call-centre'.