BANK OF MAHARASHTRA

Bank of Maharashtra

Bank of Maharashtra

Introduction

This paper will discuss the website of "Bank of Maharashtra” (http://www.bankofmaharashtra.in/). It will further highlight how this bank is dealing with its clients through ecommerce.

Bank of Maharashtra is a public sector bank with a standing of 75 years. It has a three tier organizational set up consisting of branches, Regional offices, and Central office. The Bank has 1434 branches all over India. In the state of Maharashtra itself, it has 967 branches, the largest network of branches by any Public Sector Bank in the state. The Bank has sponsored, Maharashtra Gramin Bank, Region Rural Bank, having 332 branches as of date. The Bank has set up specialized branch offices to cater to the needs of SMEs, corporates, agriculturists and importers & exporters. The bank has fine tuned its services to cater to the needs of various sections of society and incorporated the latest technology in banking offering a variety of services. The products and services offered by the Bank include demand deposits, time deposits, working capital finance, term lending, trade finance, retail loans, government business, Bancassurance business, mutual funds and other services like demat, lockers and merchant banking etc. (Timmers 2007:14-20)

Discussion

Bank of Maharashtra bank has a website at http://www.bankofmaharashtra.in/ and the homepage for Indian market can be found at http://www.bankofmaharashtra.in/know_your_bank.asp. The E-commerce strategy of Bank of Maharashtra is through its website which enables its clients to make balance enquiries; funds transfer; statement ordering and cheque book ordering. In the business market, Bank of Maharashtra target at the foreign and joint-venture enterprises, NGOs, and other international bodies in India. (Senn 2007:23-32)

Bank of Maharashtra also offer its business clients electronic salaries payment service through the clients' accounts in the banks. By linking this to its credit card service, Bank of Maharashtra now offer more convenient service to both its business and individual customers and aim to increase the number of corporate credit card users. (Prahalad 2007:79-93)

One of weaknesses of Bank of Maharashtra is the slowness in processing customers' orders and transactions, even with some basic services such as fund transfers, or opening LC. The reasons lie in heavy paper work dependence between its branches and head office and the overloaded customers' orders and transactions. Certainly, it takes time and labor of business clients to execute their daily banking affairs.

Since Bank of Maharashtra launched its ATM business, the process is still slow moving toward actual potentials of the market. One of the major reasons is that it hasn't maximized the business market for ATM products. Every year, business customers have to pay a big amount of money for their employees in cash and many of these customers registered their account in Bank of Maharashtra. However, the percentage of these amounts of money come back to the bank as deposit or saving account are very low because they are partly deposited or saved in other banks or kept under hands of employees. (Morath 2007:49-60)

By applying modern IT, Bank of Maharashtra can re-engineer their business processes to gain higher ...