Very few Banks in South Asia have state-of-the-art automation. Some cite trade unions in India as a barrier, some blame the poor quality of the paper currency notes for ATM’s. There are a few exceptions.

-- HDFC Bank under A. Puri – ex- Citibanker [ see The-South-Asian.com Jan 2000 ] spent about a billion rupees on Information Technology to place HDFC at the forefront of Technology based banking in India. HDFC has 1 million customers served by 350 ATMs. Profits soared Rs 1.2 billion from Rs 200 million in 1996. HDFC expanded aggressively to 123 Branches in 43 cities / towns . Each Branch has between 4-8 staff supported by networked computers and ATMs.

-- ICICI Bank [ K.V. Kamath is ex-ADB and director & CEO of its parent ], Profits increased Rs. 1.07 billion from Rs. 170 million in 1996. It has 86 Branches in 50 cities / towns.

---The 27 Indian State owned Banks have about 15 % to 50 % bad loans . The Pakistan State owned banks are in a similar shape , and it has taken the efforts of ex-Citibankers such as Shaukat Tarin to clean up the bad loans of United Bank [ UBL], and Union bank .

-- In talking to a major Chartered Accounting firm in Delhi , it appears that because Accounts Reconciliation is manual in most Indian State banks , the banks’ Assets & Liabilities are completed skewed and out of date .

-- The Bombay Broker Harshad Mehta, took advantage of this time lag of settlement in a manual banking system to effectively play the Bombay Stock Market using Bonds as capital to do highly leveraged trading.

A fossilised bureaucracy in the Government sectors [ with few exceptions ] meanwhile drags its feet over these new technologies .

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