With the Indian
Banking sector set to open up to overseas players, considerable interest is being evinced in the working of
banks in India. Though you would hardly find a bank in India that doesn’t have its own
website, visiting each bank’s website will indeed be a very tedious way of gathering information on the subject. A much better way would be to visit the website of the Indian Banks’ Association (IBA), the site being reviewed in this article.
IBA has for its
members banks of all hues and sizes. While there are two categories of membership, Ordinary and Associate membership, the latter comprises of small cooperative banks, their associations up to national level, foreign banks having only rep offices, and All India Financial Institutions (AIFI). Most members of the last category, AIFI, have gradually converted themselves into banks with only a few core ones left out. Thus most
important members like domestic banks both in public and private sector, foreign banks having branch presence and urban cooperative banks etc. fall under the ordinary category.
The site has sections devoted to important banking segments, namely, Retail, Social, and Wholesale. Surprisingly sections on SME (Small & Medium Enterprises) and Treasury Operations are missing. There is a
section on legal issues concerning bankers and another that provides key business statistics, though it shows data up to 2006 only at the time of writing this article, i.e., January 2008. There is a section devoted to
Bank customers as well.
The site holds an archive of its publication The Indian Banker and also provides a peep into the current issue.
The site needs revamping as also some maintenance as some of the links are misplaced, mostly shifted by a row, and the stats are not updated. The archive of its publication also has some missing issues.
Though the site does not say so on its main page, if you follow the link provided for Independent Directors under the section Others, it says that a new site is under soft launch. As you follow the link to the new site, you land on a very austere site with a single page titled “Welcome to Director’s Corner” with mail and helpline links at the top.
This is an important site indeed and probably will soon have lots of visitors so it will do well to revamp itself and get geared for the traffic.
Published: January 27, 2008
More reviews about the http://www.iba.org.in