To review base rate at ALCO meet next week: UCO Bank

Kolkata based UCO Bank is continuing with the base rate of 9.95 percent but will review it at an Asset Liability Committee (ALCO) meeting next week, informed Charan Singh, Executive Director at the bank. Speaking to CNBC-TV18 about the health of the institution, Singh said the bank's restructured portfolio is seeing a gradual reduction and retail credit is growing at 15 percent. Explaining that the bank's emphasis is on to reduce gross NPLs, he said slippages in the second quarter is likely to be lower than first quarter of this fiscal.Below is the transcript of Charan Singh's interview with Reema Tendulkar & Nigel D'Souza on CNBC-TV18. Nigel: I want an update in terms of what is your current base rate. The last number that I have is around 9.95 percent and I believe you have not cut it in the last few months. Could you give us an update on that because we had big cut coming in from HDFC Bank and they have cut base rates around 9.35 percent. Do you believe that we could see some cuts going ahead? A: We are continuing the same base rate but we will be having Asset Liability Committee (ALCO) meeting maybe in next week. In that meeting we will take a view on cutting the base rate because we will consider factors like Reserve Bank of India (RBI) cut and all those things and we will come to a conclusion on that, but at the moment we are continuing at 9.95 percent.Reema: When is your ALCO meeting? A: We have not yet decided the date but we are planning for next week. Reema: Has your cost of borrowing come down. Is there a higher probability of you going ahead and cutting base rates? A: The cost of borrowing cannot come down in short-term because we have reduced the rates on term deposits at the time when we revised last time but it will take some time to trickle down. However, if we go for marginal cost of deposits, of course it will have an impact and then we will have to see taking that impact into account while fixing our base rate.