The story
The first branch of the bank in Amritsar was established on 24 June 1908 by Sikh reformers of the Singh Sabha movement, namely Bhai Vir Singh, Sir Sunder Singh Majitha, and Sardar Tarlochan Singh, to serve the then Sind and Punjab areas of colonial India. The bank was established as a bank "by the Sikhs, for the Sikhs". The bank initially was going to be named The Punjab Union Bank Ltd but it ended being incorporated as The Punjab & Sind Bank Limited to accommodate the Punjabi population living in Sindh. It opened on 24 June 1908 at Hall Bazaar, Amritsar with an akhand path and ardas prayer by Mohan Singh, with 10,000 rupees being collected for the bank on its first opening. Majithia was the chairman for the Board of Directors, Trilochan Singh was the managing director, and the other directors were Vir Singh, Dharam Singh, Mahindar Singh, Harkishan Lal, Mehr Singh Chawla, Baghail Singh, and Shivdev Singh. Two other branches were opened shortly after, namely at Gujranwala (August 1908) and Rawalpindi (October 1908).
By 1947, the bank had eleven branches at Amritsar, Lahore, Lyallpur, Gujranwala, Rawalpindi City, Rawalpindi Cantt, Sialkot and Ludhiana, with sub-offices in Jaranwala, Lahore City and Gojra. However, the 1947 partition of India led to it losing many of its locations in the newly-formed Pakistan, leaving it with two branches remaining in independent India. The following period of the bank was under Balbir Singh (brother of Vir Singh) as its managing director from January 1947 to October 1974. The following year it eight branches after opening new locations and thirteen branches by 1954. In 1960, Inderjit Singh joined the bank, becoming chairman in 1968, and managing director between 1980 and 1981. Inderjit Singh's tenure was a period of expansion for the bank, as they had opened 546 new branches between 1968 and 1981. Inderjit Singh introduced a lot of programs in the bank related to Sikh history as he wished to promote Sikh teachings and considered the bank to be "only banking institution for the Sikhs in the country".
In the 1960s, Punjab & Sind Bank established a branch in London. The logo of the bank was designed by the artist Bodhraj in 1972. In 1974, it published its first annual calendar on Sikh history. On 15 April 1980, Punjab & Sind Bank was among six banks that the Government of India nationalised in the second wave of nationalisation (the first wave had been in 1969 when the government nationalised the top 14 banks). In 1991 Bank of Baroda acquired Punjab & Sind Bank's London branch at the behest of the Reserve Bank of India following Punjab & Sind's involvement in the Sethia fraud in 1987.
Since 2004, the bank has shown growth of over 40% year on year, and its IPO was oversubscribed by more than 50 times.
On 16 July 2019, Punjab & Sind Bank disclosed that it detected a fraud, worth ₹238 crore (US$25 million) by the Bhushan Power & Steel Limited.
From Wikipedia’s article on Punjab & Sind Bank, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5