With public sector banks losing share of current and savings account business, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has asked state-run bank chiefs to focus on innovative deposit instruments so that they can raise lower-cost resources to meet their financing requirements. The minister once again flagged the issue at a meeting with public sector bank chiefs on Saturday with sources saying that she wanted the lenders to focus on their "core activity". Some of the new generation private banks, for instance, are offering over 9% on certain tenures of term deposits.from Business News: Latest News on Business, Stock Markets, Financial News, India Business & World Business News https://ift.tt/G8neQZ1
While Reliance Industries, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Hindustan Unilever, Bharti Airtel, ITC, State Bank of India and Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) were the gainers, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys were the laggards. The market valuation of HDFC Bank jumped Rs 29,828.84 crore to Rs 12,97,972.04 crore. Reliance Industries continued to retain the title of the most valued firm, followed by TCS, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Infosys, Hindustan Unilever, Bharti Airtel, ITC, State Bank of India and LIC.
Mumbai recorded the best property sale registrations in 11 years, with total registrations of 127,139 real estate properties in 2023. The total value of stamp duty collected was Rs 10,889 crore, a 10-year high recording and a year-on-year growth of 22%. Residential units constituted 80% of the registered properties. Central and Western suburbs together constituted over 75% of the registrations. There was a 57% increase in high-value property registrations, and properties valued at Rs 1 crore and above were less impacted by increasing prices and policy repo rate.
India's foreign exchange reserves reached a 21-month high of $620.441 billion in the week ending December 22, 2023, with the Reserve Bank of India adding about $58 billion to its foreign exchange kitty in 2023. The country's foreign currency assets rose to $549.747 billion, while gold reserves declined to $474.74 billion. The decline in forex reserves since October 2021 can be attributed to a rise in imported goods' cost in 2022 and RBI's intervention to defend the rupee against the US dollar's surge.
AI & IP-led digital assurance and digital engineering services provider Cigniti Technologies has set up a new offshore delivery centre (ODC) in Hyderabad as part of its expansion drive. The new 40,000 sq ft facility, which has come up at the International Tech Park in the heart of Hyderabad’s IT hub of Madhapur, will have a capacity to accommodate around 400 techies and will take Cigniti’s total ODC footprint in Hyderabad to around 2.4 lakh sq ft.
The RBI has increased the capital requirements for SBI and HDFC Bank under its guidelines for systemically important banks as it sees higher contagion risks. The need for a higher capital buffer comes at a time when the central bank analysed how problems in one bank could affect others in its financial stability report. The report shows that if the most critical bank were to fail, it would now affect 3.6% of all banks’ tier-1 capital, up from 2.2% in March 2023.