Retail banking in India - trends, problems and prospects

Abstract

The term retail banking encompasses housing loans, retail deposit schemes, retail loans, credit cards, debit cards, insurance products, mutual funds, depository services including demat facilities and a host of other services catering to the needs of the individual customers. It can be seen that retail banking includes various financial services and products forming part of the assets as well as the liabilities segment of the Banks. In other words, it refers to taking care of the banking needs of individual customers in an integrated manner. In India retail banking has become one of the most attractive segments for banks because of reasons that have been analyzed in this report. The primary objective behind the study was to find out if the growth in this segment in India of long term nature or is it more of a bubble nature. Even more importantly, we set out to discover the changes that India would need to implement if the tremendous growth in this field has to be sustained over the years.