By IANS,
Dubai : Bank of India (BoI), a leading Indian public sector bank, is seeking to open a representative office in the Gulf nation of Qatar.
“I have met the QCB (Qatar Central Bank) governor and submitted our application for the Doha representative office. I am hopeful the Qatari authorities will consider our application favourably,” BoI chief executive K.R. Kamath told the Gulf Times newspaper.
The bank has already received a licence to open its first representative office in the Gulf in Dubai next month.
Kamath made it clear that the bank was not interested in entering the Qatar Financial Centre, which was established to attract international financial institutions and multinational corporates to establish business operations for long-term and mutually beneficial partnership with Qatar.
“That’s not the kind of business we are looking at in Qatar. We wish to do retail business here,” he said.
BoI already manages two branches of Almana Exchange in the Qatari capital Doha.
The bank has online remittance facility to some 2,000 branches in India.
There are around 200,000 expatriate Indians in Qatar.
The 100-year-old BoI has 3,000 branches in India and 22 branches and four representative offices in 14 countries.