CEO's Report - 2009

Guardian Bank continues to go beyond banking to fulfill its social objectives and educate its members about making use of opportunities in their life. The one word that seemed to be on everyone’s mind in the last financial year was “Recession”. At Guardian Bank too we were aware of the circumstances around us and decided to make sure that the bank, its members and customers were informed and equipped to face the situation. We are glad that we decided to take stock of the situation as it has helped the bank to educate its members on dealing with the circumstances and making good use of opportunities.

The last financial year has been a year of challenges to every industry including the banking industry. One of the first steps that we took was to make our borrowers aware of the importance of regular repayments to their loans. The borrowers were made to understand that a regular repayment would get them a higher credit rating with the bank and this would be handy when they wanted further finance from the bank.

TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT
Training and Development is the framework for helping employees to develop their personal and organizational skills, knowledge, and abilities. The focus of our bank has been on developing a superior workforce so that the organization and individual employees can accomplish their work goals in service to customers. There is no doubt that a well trained and developed staff is a valuable asset to the company and to facilitate that the bank organized both Internal and External training programs. The training has enabled our staff to handle any job responsibility without hesitation. The staff was trained in communication skills, customer service, human relations and work ethics. The training has helped to improve interpersonal relationship and customer satisfaction.

BRANCH LICENSE
The Reserve Bank of India has finally opened its doors for sanctioning branch licenses to Co-operative Banks.  The RBI had laid down the conditions for sanctions of branch licenses vide its circular.  As your bank has complied with all the conditions stipulated, the Reserve Bank of India has sanctioned one branch license for the year 2009-10 in Begur.  We are delighted to inform you that we will be shortly opening our first Branch at Begur.  We are expecting that the RBI will sanction at least one branch per year which we feel is a good start to expand our operations and reach out to our members to provide exclusive banking services.

VALUE ADDED SERVICES
In our efforts to serve our members and customers better we have been trying to give some value added services. One of the value added services that we have introduced is the SMS alerts that we send to our banking customers. While opening the account if the customer registers his/her mobile number with the bank, an SMS alert is sent to the customer when a cheque is presented to their account. We are working on ways that these SMS alerts can be extended for all the banking transactions carried out in their account so that they will be able to identify when an unauthorized transaction takes place.

Many of our Current Account customers informed us that they had installed EDC machines (also called Debit/Credit Card swiping machines) of other banks in their places of trade. Due to this the funds collected during the day because of the sales could be availed by them only on the third or fourth day. Guardian Bank started exploring ways in which we could also give the same facility to our customers. We are happy to inform you that we will be offering the Debit/Credit Card swiping facility to all our current account holders / business accounts.

Technology keeps advancing with each passing day and the advancement in technology has changed the spectrum of the entire financial sector. Whether it’s filing of your income tax or carrying out any banking transaction, technology has allowed us to sit in our offices and carry out these transactions. As you are aware that Guardian Bank started by fully computerizing its banking operations. We now stand at the threshold of utilizing technology to a greater extent for the growth of the bank. With the opening of our first Branch in Begur we will have to adopt the Core Banking Solutions that would facilitate Anywhere Banking.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are very grateful to all the institutions that have opened their institutional accounts with us. This has helped us to serve the members of our community better. We hope that many more institutions will come forward to have a banking relationship with us and by serving these institutions we will be able to be able to reach out to the larger community.

Our members and customers have helped us grow by establishing a banking relationship with us. We thank them for their valuable suggestions and advice which has helped us to be what we are today. We encourage all our members to avail of the banking facilities and enable your bank to grow.

All our banking consultants have been a great help to us with their invaluable advice be it on legal issues or banking related issues. We are grateful to the service that they have rendered to us.

The Board of Directors has been a great source of inspiration and encouragement to us. They have guided us with their wealth of knowledge and shown us their dedication by their commitment to spearhead the various committees. The different committees have helped to formulate systems, policies and procedures which have been appreciated by the regulating authorities.

We acknowledge the presence of God Almighty, who has guided us and helped us to fulfill the responsibility of serving His community.