South Indian Bank Limited (SIB) (BSE: 532218, NSE: SOUTHBANK) is a private sector bank headquartered at Thrissur in Kerala, India. It is headed by Dr VA Joseph, Managing Director & CEO of the bank. South Indian Bank has 705 branches spread across more than 26 states and union territories in India. It has set up 683 ATMs all over India. In the year 2010-11, the bank is planning to add 60 more branches throughout India, thus allowing it to have a presence in all the states of India. The current growth plan of the bank is to establish 750 branches, 750 ATMs and 750 billion businesses by the end of financial year 2013. The bank offers major services in various segments- accounts and deposits, loans, mutual funds, insurance, money transfers and other value added services. The Kerala government had given permission to SIB to accept commercial taxes. The bank has been appointed as the largest service provider (point of sale) for the New Pension Scheme (India) launched by the Government of India.

INDIAN BANK (BSE: 523465, NSE: INDIANB) is an Indian state-owned financial services company headquartered in Chennai, India. It has 22,000 employees, 1923 branches and is one of the big public sector banks of India. It has overseas branches in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and 229 correspondent banks in 69 countries. Since 1969 the Government of India has owned the bank, which celebrated its centenary in 2007. It is the only Indian Bank other than State Bank of India to feature in the List of Fortune 500 Companies in tht World.

In the last quarter of 1906, Madras (now Chennai) was hit by the worst financial crisis the city was ever to suffer. Of the three best-known British commercial names in 19th century Madras, one crashed; a second had to be resurrected by a distress sale; and the third had to be bailed out by a benevolent benefactor. Arbuthnot & Co, which failed, was considered the soundest of the three. Parry's (now EID Parry), may have been the earliest of them and Binny & Co.'s founders may have had the oldest associations with Madras, but it was Arbuthnot, established in 1810, that was the city's strongest commercial organization in the 19th Century. A key figure in the bankruptcy case for Arbuthnot's was the Madras lawyer, V. Krishnaswamy Iyer; he went on to organize a group of Chettiars that founded Indian Bank. Annamalai and Ramaswami Chettiar founded Indian Bank (IB)on 15 August 1907.

South India is the area encompassing India's states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu as well as the union territories of Lakshadweep and Pondicherry, occupying 19.31% of India's area (635780 km² or 245476.030 mi²). The region is also known as Dravida as is used in the National anthem.

South India lies in the peninsular Deccan Plateau and is bounded by the Arabian Sea in the west, the Indian Ocean in the south and the Bay of Bengal in the east. The geography of the region is diverse, encompassing two mountain ranges, the Western and Eastern Ghats, and a plateau heartland. The Godavari, Krishna, Tungabhadra and Kaveri rivers are important non-perennial sources of water.

A majority of Indians from the southern region speak one of the Dravidian languages: Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Tulu, and Kodava. During its history, a number of dynastic kingdoms ruled over parts of South India whose invasions across southern and southeastern Asia impacted the history and cultures of modern sovereign states such as Sri Lanka, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. The region was colonised by Britain and gradually incorporated into the British Empire.