Public sector lender UCO Bank has set up a loan hub specially for the Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) in Bangalore. The loan hub is a step by the bank to increase its lending to the sector.

"The bank has been a pioneer in deploying credit for priority sector and has been aggressively lending to MSME sector. We attach great importance towards lending to SME sector as it is the largest employment generating sector after agriculture in India," Arun Kaul, chairman and managing director of UCO Bank said.

The loan hubs would also increment in the credit requirement of entrepreneus in the range of Rs 25 lakh to Rs 25 crore, added Kaul.

The processing time for these loans is normally kept at around 21 days.

"We are setting up SME processing centres to concentrate on lending to the broad based SME category," he said.

The bank has plans to set up another 26 such branches all over the country including Delhi, Coimbatore, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Ludhiana, Jaipur, Vellore, Surat, Ernakulam and Mumbai among others.

The current branch count of the bank is at more than 2200.