Mumbai: Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman will be on a two-day visit to Mumbai, beginning Tuesday. Her schedule includes interaction with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the launch of EASE 4.0 Index—a reform agenda for 2021-22 for public sector banks.
Tuesday’s interaction would be with senior officials of the Income Tax Department at the agency's office at Bandra Kurla Complex followed by a meeting with senior officials of Customs and Goods and Service Tax departments. Sitharam-an is also scheduled to meet a delegation of CII.
On the second day of her visit, Sitharaman would meet chief executive officers of public sector banks (PSBs) to review annual financial performance of the state-run lenders and launch EASE 4.0 (Enhanced Access and Service Excellence), which is aimed at institutionalising clean and smart banking.
According to agencies, co-lending with non-banking firms, digital, agriculture financing, and technological resilience for 24x7 banking are expected to be part of Ease 4.0 Index. The Ease Index was launched in January 2018. The FM is expected to declare the results of Ease 3.0 Index for 2020-21. PSBs would be rated on various indexes for the year.
This year PSBs will focus on introducing and promoting new analytics-based offers to existing retail customers like pre-approved car loans, EMI offers on e-commerce purchases and also for existing MSME customers. Such offers will be based on bank transactions, income tax and GST returns, transactions on e-commerce portals, and other operational data.
