Central Bank of India to close 600 branches by next year

The Central Bank of India is planning to shut 13% of its branches to improve its financial health. The bank is looking to reduce the number of branches by 600 by either shutting down or merging loss-making branches by the end of March 2023.

This will be followed by the sale of non-core assets such as real estate. Currently, the Central Bank of India, which is more than 100-year-old, has a network of 4,594 branches across the country. However, the closure of the branches has not been reported earlier.

The Central Bank was placed under Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) prompt corrective action (PCA) in 2017 after the regulator found some state-run lenders were in breach of its rules on regulatory capital, bad loans and leverage ratios.

The bank was placed under the PCA framework in June 2017 and in that quarter the lender had registered a loss of 7.50 billion rupees while its GNPA ratio was at 17.27%. A bank that comes under PCA faces greater scrutiny by the RBI. It also faces restrictions on lending and deposit, branch expansion, hiring freezes, and other limitations on borrowings.