Central Bank of India, 100-year old state lender, to shut 600 branches

Central Bank of India, a state-owned 100-year old lender, is planning to shut 600 branches by the end of the current financial year.

The public sector bank will reduce 13 percent of its branches to improve its financial health which has been under pressure for several years, as reported by Reuters.

Central Bank of India would either shut down or merge these loss-making branches by the end March 2023. It currently has a network of 4,594 branches.

It is the most drastic step the lender has taken to improve its finances and will be followed by the sale of non-core assets such as real estate, said the report.

Central Bank along with a clutch of other lenders was placed under RBI's prompt corrective action (PCA) in 2017 after the regulator found some state-run lenders were in breach of its rules on regulatory capital, bad loans and leverage ratios.

Since then all the lenders except Central Bank have improved their financial health and come off RBI's PCA list.