Letters: Banking smart?

This refers to the news report “SBI mulls separate company for private banking business” (December 1). With SBI merging all its associate banks one by one, the move to establish a new entity carved out of its existing business segment by spending a large amount of stakeholders’ money is quite surprising. SBI would do well to earmark one of its existing associate banks, equipped with necessary infrastructure and well-trained personnel, to take up this new idea of banking to save cost, time and other resources.

In view of the merger of many associate banks, SBI will have a lot of duplication of the branch network in the vicinity and it is time it took measures to consolidate and standardise the bank’s operations to gain a competitive advantage.

B Venkateswaran, Chennai