State Bank of India (SBI), the country’s largest lender to save Rs 1,000 crore by instituting Work from Anywhere Infrastructure, said chairman Rajnish Kumar in his speech at the 65th Annual General Meeting of the bank held via videoconferencing, on Tuesday.
He highlighted, SBI has about 2.5 lakh employees and 24,000 branches across different states with a customer base of over 44 crores, a diversified loan portfolio, and digital leadership across channels as a key strength. The focus would be on cost reduction, rationalisation, and reskilling of the workforce, improving productivity among staff and redeployment of the workforce from admin offices to sales roles. Bank will take proactive action, to help customers and maintaining asset quality.
SBI’s total deposits grew at a faster rate of 11.34 per cent in FY20, compared to industry growth of 7.9 per cent, to Rs 32.42lakh crore from the previous year’s level of Rs 29.11 lakh crore. The foreign deposits grew by 20.45 per cent to about Rs 1.17 lakh crore, while domestic deposits grew by 11.03 per cent to Rs 31.25 lakh crore.
Kumar said that the current financial year would be challenging for the country’s largest bank as an impact of the pandemic on business and SBI has prepared to deal with those upcoming challenges and has stepped up monitoring all the projects, and expects to overcome COVID-19 impact in the short-medium term. SBI will aim to restructure small and medium businesses financially and micro-market vertically.

Read EquityPandit’s Nifty Bank Outlook for the Week