CANARA BANK SAYS READY TO PICK PARTNER

India-based Canara Bank said at the weekend that it was preparing to enter into a life assurance partnership with a foreign investor “within the current financial year”. Canara Bank managing director MBN Rao said that “we have initiated discussion with a few potential partners, which includes foreign ones and two Indian banks”. Mr Rao said that the venture “could either be a consortium of Indian banks with a foreign player or only Canara Bank with a foreign partner”. He said that the partnership set-up was likely to be finalised within three months. The initial capital base would be Rp1bn, the statutory minimum. Mr Rao said he hoped that the venture would be up and running by the end of the current financial year. He did not think that Canara Bank could be considered to have “missed the boat” in life assurance, since it had a customer base in India of 28.5m people. “The customer base is strong enough and we want to tap this initially to break into the [life assurance] segment”, he told a press conference.