Tamilnad Mercantile Bank is on a technology-investments drive, an initiative which will repurpose more than half its staff towards sales to ramp up revenues.

This will prevent layoffs while the automation benefits will be in a lot of repeat jobs, said 

The bank’s overall employee count is expected to rise by over 200 from the current strength of 5,000. Plans are afoot to add 50 branches to the current network strength of 614. 

"Two years down the line, about 50-60% of the employees will get repurposed into sales. We will be training them for the new roles," Tamilnad Mercantile Bank managing director and CEO Salee S Nair said, while speaking on the sidelines of an event to announce the lender’s tie-up with tech major Oracle.

When Nair joined TamilNad Mercantile Bank in August 2024 after his 35-year stint at State Bank of India, he found many processes at the South-based lender were being done manually and the use of technology was largely limited to the core banking solution.

The bank’s board sanctioned an outlay of Rs 250 crore for FY26 to revamp processes with upgraded technology tools.

A similar amount will be spent in FY27, keeping the technology spends at over 10% of the operating expenses. The technology expenditure will lower after this and its proportion to operating expenses would reduce.

The bank’s thrust areas on the asset side will be to grow the small businesses and unsecured loans. 

The lender has guided to a loan growth of 16-17% for FY26 and net interest margin of 3.9%.