SBI aiming to modernise its core banking infrastructure in next 2 years

India's largest lender is overhauling its IT backbone for agility, scale, and AI-led efficiency

India’s largest lender State Bank of India (SBI) is aiming to complete the modernisation of its core banking infrastructure in the next two years, Ashwini Kumar Tewari, managing director, SBI, said on Thursday.

 

He said that the bank has been working on a four-axis strategy, which includes upgrading its hardware, migrating from Unix to Linux, hollowing out the core by externalising functions such as vendor and government payments, and introducing microservices for operations like inquiries and accounting.

 

These initiatives, Tewari said, are helping the bank re-architect its core systems for greater agility and scale.

 

Tewari also highlighted that the state-owned lender is building a private cloud infrastructure to ensure scalability while maintaining regulatory compliance and data security. “We are modernising as we run the ship. Our systems must always remain on and available to customers,” Tewari said. 

Additionally, Tewari said SBI is now deploying agentic AI through a fintech partner to verify trade finance documents such as guarantees and letters of credit — helping both internal teams and customers achieve faster, more accurate processing. SBI has developed a sandbox and innovation hub, opening access to nearly 300 APIs that allow fintechs to test and integrate their solutions with SBI’s systems.

 

Tewari also said that SBI is exploring AI applications in areas like service ticket resolution and document analysis to enhance operational efficiency.