State Bank of India renews deal with TCS for five years
The five-year deal will cover SBI’s applications in core banking, trade finance, financial reporting, and financial inclusion.
State Bank of India (SBI) has extended its engagement with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for another five years, according to a stock exchange filing from TCS.
“As part of the new contract, TCS will continue to maintain and enhance SBI’s application estate around core banking, trade finance, financial reporting, and financial inclusion with new features and functionality,” TCS stated in the exchange filing. SBI's engagement with TCS dates back to 2001.
“We are pleased to extend our relationship with TCS as we continue to work together to launch new initiatives for enhanced customer experience,” said Ravindra Pandey, Deputy Managing Director and CIO of SBI, in the exchange filing.
“TCS will continue to leverage its deep contextual knowledge of SBI’s business and technology landscape to help the bank with large transformation programmes,” the exchange filing said. It cited Bharat Craft, SBI's omni-channel platform for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, as a recent engagement from the existing contract.
TCS also worked on SBI’s merger of five associate banks and the Bharatiya Mahila Bank, the company said. It involved integrating more than 200 business processes, 43 IT applications, 17,500 products, and over 50 billion database records.
The implementation in six weeks impacted over 50,000 tellers in 7,000 branches, TCS added.
“TCS’ two decades-long relationship with SBI is a testament to our customer-centricity and our approach of harnessing collective knowledge to create greater futures,” said Ujjwal Mathur, Head of TCS India.
SBI has listed a number of ambitious technology programmes for the year ahead. It is implementing a data warehousing solution to harness the growing volume of data. “An advanced analytical platform with component such as data lake, and virtualisation layer, amongst others is being implemented to enhance the analytical capabilities,” according to the SBI annual report for FY 2020-21.
It also aims to apply analytics and enable applications, such as pre-approved personal loans and business loans, two-wheeler loans, and POS online equated monthly instalment (EMI). SBI has already developed an AI-based model for SME New to Bank customers.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, SBI has deployed a virtual private network to enables its operational staff across India to work from anywhere (WFA). “Many administrative and operational activities in domestic and foreign office or branches are being carried out remotely through WFA facilities,” the country’s largest bank said.
It implemented the pilot project of WFA at its liability centralised processing centres in Mumbai last year. "Going forward, “Work from Anywhere” project will be leveraged to full extent and will be extended to other LCPCs," according to the SBI annual report.