KTB brings in expert to enhance retail banking business
Krungthai Bank has enlisted the chief of CFG Services or Srisawad Ngern Tid Lor (Money on Wheels), a subsidiary of Bank of Ayudhya, to help retail banking and boost fee income.
“Under the three-year strategy of KTB’s president, the bank must go back to the top where we belong, so we have to recruit bankers who have experience in retail banking to help develop products and synergy with existing products to increase product holdings,” Weidt Nuchjalearn, first senior executive vice president of KTB, said yesterday.
KTB recently approached Tanyapong Thamavaranukupt, who was the managing director of CFG Service, to help improve retail banking including microfinance. Tanyapong has deep experience in this field.
He will start work on October 28 as an adviser to KTB’s president, overseeing product improvement and synergy, because KTB has many subsidiaries. Streamlining procedures will help extend loans and services to customers quickly.
Under the strategy, KTB must increase fee income from cross-selling products because even though it has the largest accounts among large banks, its fee income lags behind them.
It is the country’ second-largest bank but its profit fell behind the third and fourth banks. Last year, KTB reported net profit of Bt23.52 billion, while Siam Commercial Bank’s net profit was Bt40.22 billion and Kasikornbank’s was Bt35.26 billion.
KTB has the biggest customer base with 17 million to 18 million accounts, but a customer uses only 2.6 products on average. The bank has attempted to increase that to more than four products per customer by next year.
Tanyapong said he was recently assigned to help retail banking at KTB, since it was a segment that KTB wants to grow.
Weidt said Tanyapong had experience in microfinance, while KTB had entered that segment by allowing vendors without bank statements to tap credit at a lower interest rate than loan sharks charge.
However, the bank has slowed down lending to vendors in fresh markets.
“We are improving the process of debt collection, so outstanding loans this year might freeze at Bt1.4 billion to Bt15 billion. We will aggressively provide loans to this segment again after debt collection is complete,” he said.
