"We have not leveraged IT much"- Arundhati Bhattacharya,chairperson, SBI

The first woman chairperson of SBI- Arundhati Bhattacharya - comes out with a damning revelation: ‘that SBI has not leveraged its IT to its fullest potential'. According to news reports, in her first ‘meet the press' appearance, she indicated that SBI will be relying much more on IT to tide over the nonperforming assets (NPAs) problem.

A report in DNA quoting Bhattacharya said, "To improve NPA management, SBI will employ more tools than before, with emphasis on effective use of IT. And IT is going to be used in risk mitigation, product pricing, customer-related issues and in raising productivity. The bank will also ramp up technology to tackle loan recovery."

The CXO rises

The remarks by Bhattacharya only reinforces the growing trend of IT decision making spilling out of the technology organizations within enterprises headed by the CIOs. The stake holders are now getting bigger- right from CXO, CFO to the functional heads- her remarks are typical of any progressive CXO who looks tech as not just a business operations enabler - but one that positively impacts the bottom-line.

It is also interesting to note that SBI is one of the early movers in adopting core banking among PSB's and it started its tech journey in more serious manner with the onslaught of private banks in 2002. During this time it decided to leave behind its distributed computing environment and adopted a branch banking solution called ‘Bankmaster' a CBS solution vendored by FNS, a company based out of Australia. It may be recalled TCS bought FNS and became the CBS vendor to SBI.

SBI's CBS deployment is considered as world's biggest deployment given its scale and size- the bank has more than 15,000 branches and 8,000 plus ATMs today. The CBS at 2002 factored in about 3,300 branches at that time, but it was gradually scaled to cover almost all branches. The solution TCS deployed at SBI was called ‘BaNCS Core Banking'. In the initial stages of CBS, the bank had some teething transitional pangs that sometimes led to major customer ire.

So clearly, now with issues like NPA eating into the banks (not just SBI, it's a industry wide trend) assets and profitability, more innovative custom country specific tech is needed to map the trends more accurately.

Also it would be interesting to look at how SBI would be approaching big data and analytics that when married with its CBS will give massive insights.

 

At this point in time, it becomes evident that Bhattacharya will soon be coming out with a tech roadmap for SBI 2.0 or whatever one wishes to call as the bank prepares to embrace some leading edge tech more tuned to the current market dynamics.

Stay tuned for more updates on this.