SBI Rules Out Rate War, Focuses on Service Quality

Mumbai: State Bank of India (SBI) the country’s largest lender has ruled out the possibility of a rate war among banks in garnering more deposits.

Speaking at the third day of The Global Fintech Fest on Friday, SBI’s newly appointed chairman CS Setty said that the lenders would instead use service quality and bank branches in getting more deposits.

“It is a fact that due to the change in asset allocation of the customers, some movement of investments is going to other asset classes, so obviously increase in credit growth and savings to other asset classes is putting pressure on deposits of the banks. Most of the banks including us are not getting into a rate war. We want to attract customers by way of improved service quality and some banks are looking at opening branches,” he said, adding that competition for deposits is likely to continue for some time.”

“Fortunately, we have a very comfortable CD ratio, and we are not under pressure to reduce the CD ratio. We have robust credit growth, and we expect 14-15 per cent credit growth. Even if we have 8-10 per cent deposit growth in SBI, because of the large base in absolute numbers, it will be larger than the absolute amount of credit growth,” Setty remarked.

The Bank also rolled out an ambitious five-year digital transformation roadmap focused on technology resilience, optimising data architecture, and enhancing infrastructure networks. Adding on SBI’s YONO, Setty said, “It is a deeper technological transformation happening at YONO 2.0, we are looking at stability, scalability and robustness of application and creating an omni-channel experience for customers. Expect YONO 2.0 sometime in November.”