Friday, August 16, 2013

City of London and City of Kolkata

City of London, as we have noted earlier in this blog, is a small part of London known as its Central Financial District where the Financial Service Institutions are located. Last year Minister Firhad Hakim and I met senior directors of the City of London and discussed about the Internatinal Financial Hub that is being developed in New Town Kolkata.

Recently, Mr Rishikesh Chanda of the British Deputy High Commission informed me that the City of London has carried relevant details of the Financial Hub in Kolkata in their newsletter. A snapshot:


Meanwhile, we have obtained a list of 26* institutions who have applied for new banking licence and I am writing to them to consider the Financial Hub of Kolkata.

(*some of these are: Reliance Capital, Srei Infrastructure Finance, Magma Fincorp, JM Financial, Sriram Capital, IDFC, Indiabulls, India Infoline, Religare, Edelweiss etc: Source Business Standard)

4 comments:

  1. Its a great news!.... lets hope we can catch the big fishes for some real business delight for the state!

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  2. A nice move. Sir, what made Bombay , the greatest financial hub of India, was the establishment of RBI and SBI Headquarters in Bombay in 50s. That gave Bombay a headstart and soon other private banks took a similar move.

    If we want to make New Town finance hub a huge success, we need to have some headquarters here. Can we give some compelling offer to these 26 institutions so that they think of establishing their headquarters in New Town?

    Can we give land to them at say 3 crores / acre ( I am just quoting a number) instead of the price HIDCO is charging for other plots? Sir, we need to offer some really out of the box stuff to have the banks establish their headquarters in a new finance hub?

    Tougher thing will be to explore the things at the next level i.e for the already established banks. What offers can we give to Yes Bank or ICICI Bank to get their headquarters shifted to Kolkata. Corporates wants cheap land as one of the important per-requisities. However a tougher thing which will bring more investment is making more business volumes happen in Calcutta Stock Exchange and making it more relevant.

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  3. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Prospective-banks-may-find-space-in-fin-hub/articleshow/21906721.cms

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  4. We have also telephonically contacted WTC Mumbai

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