Pune: All India Bank Employees’ Association (AIBEA) general secretary CH Venkatachalam on Saturday said action should be taken against customers using abusive language or manhandling employees.“I demand an equivalent provision in the coming bipartite (agreement between banks and unions) that a customer abusing employees should be disciplined or the act should be considered as misconduct. Action should be taken against such a person,” he said at the ninth conference of All India Bank of Maharashtra Employees’ Federation (AIBOMEF) in the city. The two-day conference till Sunday will discuss issues related to bank employees.Venkatachalam said the slowing recruitment was also a concern among the bank employees. Increased recruitment will lead to an increase in the “current account, savings account” (CASA) deposits. Banks raise these low-cost deposits through customer service and community outreach, he said. Currently, the CASA deposits, valuable to banks in terms of margins, are on a decline.He said the bank unions would continue to oppose the privatisation of banks as they did not see any merit in it. Speaking at the same event, AIBOMEF general secretary Devidas Tuljapurkar said the conference was last held in 2019, when Bank of Maharashtra had just come out of the prompt corrective action (PCA) of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The PCA framework is imposed by the central bank on financially weaker banks with large losses or poor asset quality. He said Bank of Maharashtra since then was among the fastest-growing govt-owned banks and transitioned from a small to a mid-sized bank.Bank of Maharashtra MD and CEO Nidhu Saxena said the bank had achieved growth owing to the alignment of the bank employees’ personal and professional goals with the targets set by it.
