State Bank of India upgrades centralised banking system

Lender invested additional $192,475 to step up customer service in its 13,000 branches through technology.

Advanced scanning technology that would be able to detect an RFID chip embedded in their debit cards and flash an alert on the bank's computers will happen in the near future, and is a part of the country's largest and oldest bank's drive to use technology to take the concept of a ‘friendly bank’ a notch higher, a senior SBI official said in a report in Business Standard.

SBI Chairman O P Bhatt said technology has played a big role in giving SBI the edge it enjoys today. The implementation has happened in a phased manner, but any new branch is on CBS now from the very first day. The second part of the exercise was to connect the ATMs. Over the last nine months, SBI has added 1,000 ATMs per month, the largest such rollout in the world.

In a span of nine years (2000-09), SBI has managed to roll out core banking systems (CBS) to all its 13,000 branches, making it one of the largest banks in Asia to have a single CBS platform. It has also connected close to 3,000 ATMs to a centralised network.

SBI has 170 to 180 million accounts and its subsidiaries have another 80 million or so. The average daily transactions handled by the IT system are about 25 million. And peak-time transactions (generally in March) go up by 10 - 15 percent.