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Mumbai, Nov. 27 Centurion Bank of Punjab is still open to acquisitions. Though the bank is not looking at anything concrete currently, Mr Shailendra Bhandari, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Centurion Bank of Punjab, said, “If you ask for my wishlist then I would prefer acquiring a bank of similar scale and size.”

Explaining the reason behind this he said, “Now that our bank has a reasonably good presence in various geographies if we acquire further, it would be mainly to boost up the scale and size of our bank.”

The bank has 400 branches in 180 locations.

The bank had recently acquired Lord Krishna Bank. Though the bank has completed the acquisition process, there are some operations like system integration, which would take some time for completion, he added.

Talking about two-wheeler loans, Mr Bhandari said that there has been a dip in that segment and maintained that they would like to go slow. Two-wheeler loans currently constitute 17 per cent of the bank’s total retail portfolio. The bank has however started slowing down its exposure to this segment, he said.

The bank’s overall advances grew by 69 per cent on a year-on-year basis in September, two-wheeler advances, however, grew only by four per cent. “We took a conscious decision to go slow in this segment. We started reducing our exposure to this segment since December last year,” said Mr Bhandari.

Senior officials of the bank said that rising interest rates, rising inflation, over leveraging and a sluggish growth in the two-wheeler industry have resulted in the slowdown in two-wheeler financing.

“The acceleration of growth in the two-wheeler loan segment has stopped. While rising interest rate was one reason, this segment has been impacted the most due to inflation. Incomes have not kept pace with rising costs, which has led to fall in demand for two-wheelers,” said the official.

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