Date:06/11/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/11/06/stories/2007110657081700.htm

Business

Achieve financial inclusion, PSBs told

Special Correspondent

FM inaugurates Union Bank’s tech centre

— PHOTO: SHASHI ASHIWAL

TECH CENTRE: M. V. Naik, Chairman and Managing Director, Union Bank, lighting the lamp to mark the inauguration of the bank’s technology centre in Mumbai on Monday. Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram looks on.

MUMBAI: Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram on Monday said financial inclusion was possible only if banks adopted technology on a larger scale and asked public sector banks to compete with each other to achieve the goal of financial inclusion by providing funds for higher education of children of those who are not able to afford it and other weaker sections of society like, hawkers.

Inaugurating the Union Bank of India’s technology centre here he said public sector banks had driven growth in the banking industry despite constraints. “Each public sector bank has shown leadership and capacity to innovate by adopting best practices. Our banking system is the strongest today with lowest non-performing assets (NPAs).”

Two factors were driving innovation in the banking industry, according to Mr. Chidambaram, namely, human resources and technology. He said public sector banks were having the best pool of human resources. However, he said, more initiatives would emerge from the public sector, if these banks attracted best talents.

The bank’s data centre with high-end servers had been scaled up to deliver computing resources to meet business requirements. “The high end servers now serving one million transactions are capable of being scaled up to handle 6 million transactions, to take care of bank’s future organic and inorganic growth,” M. V. Nair, Chairman and Managing Director of Union Bank of India, said.

Gesture to hawkers

With the inauguration of the technology centre, the bank’s 1,201st branch brought under the CBS network and all its 2,400 branches to be brought under the network by March 2008.

It launched 32 retail asset branches which provide rapid delivery of loan sanctions to the customers’ doorstep and 12 SME SARALS — quick processing of loans to the SME segment.

It also launched on-line processing of education loans and conveying of in principle sanction in 48 hours and 5,000th bio-metric card for the hawkers of Mumbai as part of the bank’s financial inclusion project.

Corrections and clarifications