SBI to start 250 digital branches in FY16

Bank has tweaked its earlier digital branch opening strategy

State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender, will open 250 digital branches.

“Digital provides us such a good medium. On one side we have the business correspondent model, then the digital medium for new-age customers who are coming in and then, in between, we have the branch model. We have started the digital branch model and the learnings from them, and ill be rolling out another 250 digital branches this year that will be on the self-service mode,” said Arundhati Bhattacharya, the bank's chief, at an internal conclave here.

Though the lender is keen on digital branches, its earlier strategy hadn’t worked so well, said a senior bank official. Last year, in July, it started six digital branches — SBI InTouch — and planned to take it to 50 in the next one year. However, it made only one addition since then.

For SBI InTouch, the strategy had been to open digital branches in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. However, the new ones are to be opened in urban areas. “The digital branches will be in urban centres where the young population, ones who are digitally-savvy, are present. Out of 250, we have already opened three branches,” said another senior official.

Also, the new branches will be smaller than the SBI InTouch ones. Considering that the break-even timing and the cost of operations are higher in bigger branches, the bank has decided to shift to smaller digital branches. “At some places we might look at just setting it up in a kiosk, as for digital branches you don’t need bigger space,” added one of the officials quoted above.

The digital branches will continue to have one or two bank representatives.

It had earlier been debating over keeping these branches un-manned. However, that idea has been dropped. The digital branches will continue to have one or two bank representatives.

Earlier this week, the bank had launched a mobile wallet, State Bank 'Buddy', in collaboration with Accenture and MasterCard. Currently, of the 286 million customers, 22 million transact over the internet. Twelve million are mobile banking customers.