Allianz bank gets RBI nod with rider

Allianz bank gets RBI nod with rider:

"The Reserve Bank of India has finally agreed to give a licence to European financial conglomerate Allianz AG for domestic retail banking. However, sources at the central bank point out that in order to obtain the banking licence, Allianz had to compromise by dropping its earlier plan to seek the licence in its own name.

Allianz has now agreed to accept RBI’s condition that the bank be known as Dresdner, a global bank owned by Allianz, which has had a representative office in India since 2000. The central bank has given permission to Dresdner to open one branch in the country."

I liked the "Allianz had to compromise by dropping its earlier plan to seek the licence in its own name" part. If I were RBI I would have insisted on it dropping the 'd' in the middle. Sounds better, no?

Privatisation is still relevant

The ever-sensible Ajay Shah writes in BS

But equally, there is no industry in India where the licence-permit raj hinders entry more than in the case of banking. At a time when the Indian economy is booming, and every kind of business is being created, the one industry where we see no new firms starting up is banking. This has surely got to do with government restrictions on entry.

There is absolutely no industry in India where the opening of branch offices by foreign firms and private firms requires permission from the government. When Ford operates in India, it has to obey rules on FDI, but after that, it never has to go back to the government to take permission to open offices. What is worse, all foreign banks—put together—are given permission to open 12 branches per year in the full country. There is no worse instance where contemporary Indian policy-making is animated by ideas from the 1960s.

And then, what will corporates do?

Business Standard reports

A working group set up by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has recommended cross-subsidising of basic banking services to individuals and salvage the unrecovered costs through higher charges to corporates.

Nothing wrong at all for a business to cross subsidise. They do it all the time. In fact, you can say, businesses love to 'subsidize' shareholders, by extracting more price from those customers who are willing to pay more. But the question is, whether the direction should come from a central bank. If it increases the cost for corporates, would it not be passed over to their customers? So who really pays for unrecovered costs?