The National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD) on Tuesday entered the country through the wholly-owned subsidiary (WOS) route with wholesale banking operations in Mumbai.

With this, NBAD becomes the fourth foreign lender to start operations via the WOS route after the Singaporean lender DBS (May, 2015), ICBC of China (2012), FirstRand Bank of South Africa in 2013 and Doha Bank in April this year.
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The Mumbai branch will provide wholesale banking services covering areas of debt origination and distribution, project finance, trade finance and asset finance, helping to enhance NBAD's ability to service corporate and financial clients apart from providing more capital to businesses, NBAD Group chief executive Alex Thursby said.

The opening of the branch comes as NBAD has completed migration of an Indian corporate loan portfolio worth around $900 million from Royal Bank of Scotland.

Thursby ruled out the bank entering the retail business in the immediate future.

He said the bank has brought in $25 million (the minimum required under the RBI norms) equity into the branch, which has already hired 20 people which will go up to 30 soon.

The Mumbai operations will be headed by Rajeev Pant as chief executive and will offer expert advice in each of NBAD's five key industrial sectors - energy, real estate, financial, transport and aviation, and retail, he said.

"Entering India is an important milestone in our expansion across the West-East corridor, and demonstrates the UAE's strengthening ties with its largest trading partner," Thursby said, adding that the bilateral trade stood at $65 billion last year.

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