The board of ICICI Bank, the country's second-largest lender, will take a final call on appointing a successor to KV Kamath, its present managing director and chief executive officer, next month.

Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor D Subbarao said various anti-inflationary measures had started yielding results and now the government could focus on issues related to growth and liquidity.

HDFC Bank and HSBC have set the ball rolling for their private sector and foreign peers to lower deposit rates.

Bankers have highlighted the slowing credit demand in retail and corporate portfolios as an emerging challenge to the domestic banking system and sought coordinated steps from the fiscal and monetary sides to tackle the issue.

Foreign branches or subsidiaries of Indian banks proposing to deal in structured financial products will now require the prior approval of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

As many as 22 American banks have collapsed this year so far, even as the banking giant Citigroup, led by Indian-American, Vikram Pandit, struggled this week to save itself from becoming number 23 in this fast growing long list.

Union Bank of India, a public sector lender, today launched its mobile banking service, 'Umobile' enabling its customers to perform basic banking activities including account-to-account fund transfer through mobile phones.

Vikram Pandit-led Citigroup, the world's largest bank, will hand out pink slips to at least 10,000 employees beginning this week and is also planning to raise its credit card interest rates as part of plans to return to profitability, a report said today.

The Supreme Court on Monday admitted an appeal against the order of the National Consumer Commission, which had imposed restrictions on charging interest at rates in excess of 30 per cent from credit card-holders.

IDBI Bank has received 10 to 12 proposals from potential buyers of its wholly-owned subsidiary IDBI Homefinance (IHFL), a top bank executive said.

Canara Bank cut home loan rates by 75 basis points (bps) and interest rates on automobile loans by 100 bps, the bank said in a release on Saturday.

Indian students going in for higher education or job-specific courses overseas will find it tough to get loans from Indian banks.

The country's largest public sector lender State Bank of India on Tuesday said it will consider cutting down the benchmark lending rate by up to 50 basis points on Wednesday.

At a time when corporate India has seen its net profits shrink, banks, whose share prices have been hammered in recent weeks, have sprung a surprise of sorts reporting a 26 per cent growth in their bottom lines in the second quarter of 2008-09.

Finance Minister P. Chidambaram on Tuesday held a meeting with top executives of PSU banks to review liquidity situation and performance of the lenders.

Finance Minister P. Chidambaram will meet heads of public sector banks on Tuesday in the backdrop of series of measures taken by the Reserve Bank to ease money supply.

In an effort to soothe nerves of the country’s mutual funds (MFs) and the non-banking finance companies (NBFCs), the bankers today assured that they would come forward to support these financial institutions’ funding needs including liquidity to meet redemptions. With an access to additional Rs 40,000 crore of liquidity after the central bank’s slew of liquidity measures yesterday, the public sector banks today said that it is extremely comfortable for the banks to fund the MFs and NBFCs, and also to achieve a higher credit growth during the financial year.

Foreign direct investment in insurance companies in the private sector will be raised to 49 percent through a bill to be tabled in parliament.

State-owned commercial banks are expected to garner at least Rs 20,000 crore of additional bulk-deposits from public sector enterprises following an advisory from the finance ministry that government-owned companies should park their surplus cash with state-controlled banks.

Hit by higher provisioning and mark-to-market (MTM) losses on its overseas books, the country’s largest private sector lender ICICI Bank on Tuesday reported a 27.44 per cent decline in net profit on a consolidated basis to Rs 651.48 crore during the second quarter ending September 2008, against Rs 897.92 crore in the same period last year.

Yes Bank on Wednesday said it was looking at a 100-basis point reduction in lending rates by December, but public sector bank chiefs, who met Finance Minister P. Chidambaram on Monday, are expected to move faster.

The government is likely to infuse Rs 3,000 crore in seven public sector banks to shore up their Capital Adequacy Ratio (CAR) to 12 per cent to improve the market confidence in the banking sector.

Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB) Governor Rasheed Al Maraj inaugurated the new branch on the 49th floor of the Bahrain Financial Harbour (BFH) Wednesday.

ICICI Bank has asserted that its profitability trends, as reflected in its Rs 728 crore profit in the first quarter, would not be impacted by overseas subsidiaries for which mark-to-market (MTM) provision of over Rs 415 crore have been made till June