Merger of SBI associate banks not priority now: Bhattacharya

State Bank of India chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya today said the bank is currently not looking at merging its associate banks, and is instead focusing on more important challenges.
"At some point of time, yes we'll merge. But I don't think this is the right time. Because today there are a lot of challenges and those challenges are more immediate and important than merging banks," Bhattacharya told reporters here.
"The conversion to digital that is happening at such a fast pace, that's a very big challenge. The fact that we have so many other layers coming in like payments banks, universal banks, licence on tap, disintermediation happening through the crowd funding platforms, crypto currency popping up here and there, so challenges are multi-fold today," she added.

SBI has five associate banks - State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, State Bank of Patiala, State Bank of Travancore, State Bank of Hyderabad and State Bank of Mysore.
She said the associate banks are performing well on their own and have their own strength.
"Even if I merge them inside, my balance sheet will not go up, the group balance sheet remains the same. And therefore, the valuation I get will almost remain the same. Only thing that will happen is, I can bring about greater efficiency. But I can do that even without merging," she said.

Any initiative of SBI is soon picked up by the associate banks, Bhattacharya said.

"Being local banks, they're considered more close to the local populations and we'd like them to be very strong entities in their own right," she added.
Asked about rating agency Moody's lowering India's growth forecast to 7 per cent for 2015 from 7.5 per cent projected earlier, Bhattacharya said green shoots are visible in the economy.
"We are seeing many more green arrows than red arrows. To that extent, we're very hopeful. You should not base your observations on the Q1 performance, which is in any case always weak compared to last quarter," she added.