- published: 12 Jan 2011
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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.