Over 70 % centres of People’s Bank kept open during lockdown
The People’s Bank was among the first banks in the country to act on the Central Bank’s (CB) COVID-19 relief package offering over 400,000 of its retail customers’ financial relief during the crisis period.
It was also in the process of disbursing nearly 4,100 applications for working capital loans to small business owners, amounting to approximately Rs. 8.5 billion.
“Whilst these are yet in process, further are expected to be processed in the near term. Further to ease customer engagement, People’s Bank established a dedicated customer care unit to answer queries on the CB relief programmes and was amongst the first to accept customer requests, the circumstances considered, via SMS, WhatsApp and even Viber, the bank said in a detailed statement this week on its COVID-19 emergency response.
Over 70 per cent of all its branches and all its self-banking units were fully operational while ensuring absolute health and safety measures being implemented for team members and customers visiting the branches and self service centres.
Customer service support hotlines functioned throughout, all POS machines were kept active and over 400 locations were visited by the bank’s Mobile Banking Units which facilitated over Rs.200 million in withdrawals for cashstrapped customers in some of the most remote parts in the country.
The bank stopped all deductions and refunded most installments already deducted for the month of March 2020. All pawning auctions too were halted and any penalties across products were fully waived during the said period.
The bank extended over Rs.150 billion in financial facilities, of which over Rs.140 billion was disbursed to the state and other state-owned enterprises. “In this context, it must be pointed out that, during the first three months of 2020, the bank recorded a credit growth of 10.9 per cent as compared with 5 per cent reported by the industry during the same period,” the statement said.
The Aswenna loan scheme specifically aimed at making the agriculture, fisheries and animal husbandry value chain self- sufficient was relaunched.
Sarusara, a comprehensive rural credit scheme and Vanitha Saviya a loan scheme for micro and small scale women entrepreneurs was initiated with much success. With working from home and school from home becoming the norm, the bank also extended several schemes in technology facilitation for teachers, undergraduates of the medical, engineering and IT faculties and law and accountancy firms.
In addition, earlier this month, the bank undertook the responsibility of facilitating repayments to the aggrieved depositors of The Finance Company (TFC) from the CB’s deposit insurance fund. 60 branches are expected to make distributions close to 143,000 depositors of TFC.