National Savings centres: 111 of 374 branches face closure or merger, Multan and Peshawar hit hardest

The National Savings Centre near you may close or merge with another branch. Central Directorate of National Savings (CDNS) has marked 111 of its centres as inefficient and financially unsustainable and told its regional offices to fix them, move them or prepare them for closure, The Express Tribune reported on Saturday from an official notification. If all 111 go, the network would shrink from 374 centres to 263.

Why these 111 National Savings centres were picked

The test is cost. A centre is judged unviable if it spends more than Rs 2,500 a year to run for every Rs 1 million it holds in deposits, according to the notification as reported by ProPakistani and The Express Tribune. A centre with Rs 200 million in deposits, for example, would need to run on under Rs 500,000 a year to pass.

Centres on the list have three ways out:

• cut their running costs (rent, staff, utilities),
• bring in more deposits and business, or
• move to an area with "greater business and investment potential".

Regional directorates have 15 days to send a business or relocation plan for any centre they want to keep. Those that cannot be turned round are to be closed and merged with a working centre nearby. For each closure, the region must list every employee posted there, where they live and where they would prefer to be posted.

Which regions are affected

ProPakistani gave this regional count from the same document:

Those 12 regions add up to 105; the reports do not say where the remaining six are, or name individual branches. Multan and Peshawar regions, with 37 between them, take the biggest cut, so savers in southern Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are the most likely to find their branch moving.

What it means for you

Nothing in the reports touches the schemes themselves. National Savings certificates and accounts are government borrowing issued by CDNS, not by the branch, and the plan described is a merger of branches, not of schemes. What can change is where you go to collect profit, encash a certificate or update your account.

What to do now:

1. Check whether your centre is on the list by asking at the counter or the regional directorate; contacts are in the CDNS contact directory.
2. Keep your certificates, account book and CNIC copy together, so a transfer to another centre is quick if yours merges.
3. Do not encash early in a panic. Breaking a certificate before maturity can cost you profit; work out what you would lose first with our National Savings calculator.

Profit rates are unchanged by this. The current rates for every scheme, after the 1 October rise, are on our National Savings profit rates page, and Behbood now pays Rs 1,060 a month per lakh (details).

No closure dates or branch names have been published yet. We will add them here when CDNS issues them.