SBI to Hire 12,000 Employees, Focus on IT Roles

Mumbai: The country’s largest lender State Bank of India (SBI) is in the process of hiring close to 12,000 employees who would be trained for various roles, including Information Technology, its Chairman Dinesh Khara said on Thursday at the Bank’s Q4 earnings press conference.

“Around 11,000 to 12,000 employees are in the hiring process. These are general employees, but we actually are having a system where at our associate level and officers' level around 85 percent of them are engineers. We give them some exposure to understand banking and thereafter we start channelising them into various associate roles and some of them will be channelized in IT,” Khara said.

SBI had a total employee strength of 2,32,296 in FY24, down from 2,35,858 in FY 23.

On a question on RBI’s draft guidelines on infrastructure project financing, Khara said that the lender may reprice infra loans if the norms get implemented.

“Incremental provisions will not be significant. We will be able to absorb and if this becomes a reality, we will be looking at repricing the loan,” Khara said.

The bank reported a 24 percent rise in net profit at Rs 20,698 crore for the fourth quarter ended March 31, 2024 compared to Rs 16,695 crore in the year-ago period. Net Interest Income (NII) during the quarter ended March 31, 2024 increased slightly to Rs 41,655 crore from Rs 40,393 crore in the year-earlier period. Net Interest Margin declined 37 bps to 3.47 per cent. The gross non-performing asset (GNPA) came in at 2.24 percent as against 2.78 percent last year, while net NPA came in at 0.57 percent compared to 0.67 percent last year. Khara said that the GNPA is the lowest in 10 years. The bank announced a dividend of Rs 13.70 per equity share.