The largest lender of the country, State Bank of India is planning to expand its individual and remittance business in Canada. The lender has been holding presence in Canada since 1977.

Speaking about the remittance business of SBI in Canada, Sunil K Tandon, president and CEO, SBI Canada said that the personal remittance business of the bank amounts to $184 million.

"We are now working on introducing online requests for remittances. Once that is enabled, commission charges would come down and the process would become faster and our business will grow further," said Tandon.

While the bank holds its image as banker to every Indian, the biggest competition to its operations in Canada comes from another Indian lender, ICICI Bank having an altogether different positioning of itself in the Canadian domain. ICICI positions itself as a bank for the Canadians.

"We have recently re-branded and re-positioned ourselves and it has been paying off in terms of pushing up business. Our balance sheet size is $5.5 billion, of which $4 billion would be our customer deposit. Our loan book would be around $3 billion. Until now, we have nine branches and plans are afoot to expand. We will have two to three more branches within the next one year or so," Sriram H Iyer, president and CEO, ICICI Bank Canada, said.