Uco Bank to spend Rs 1,000 crore in FY25 to boost digital infrastructure

Public sector lender Uco Bank plans to spend Rs 1,000 crore in the financial year 2024-25 to boost Information Technology infrastructure, said Ashwini Kumar, managing director and chief executive officer of the bank.

The tech spending of the lender was Rs 700 crore in the financial year 2023-24.

“We are planning to spend around Rs 1,000 crore on IT wherein we are going for the upgrade of our various servers, virtual market solutions as well as technological integration of treasury systems and upgrade of our overseas (core-banking systems) CBS systems. We are bringing new technologies on cyber security and also going to integrate our transaction monitoring,” said Ashwini Kumar, managing director and chief executive officer, Uco Bank.

Kumar also said that digitisation of the processes will aid in reducing the cost of sanction and disbursal of loans. The digital transformation will also aid in the recovery mechanism and reduce the follow-up cost. It will also open up cross-selling opportunities for the lender.

The lender added that increased IT spending is not on account of the technical glitch in the Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) which led to an erroneous credit of Rs 820 crore to account holders of the bank in November 2023.

The bank has recovered Rs 728 crore from these accounts as of 31 March 2023.

Kumar also noted that increased technology spending will help to reduce the cost of customer acquisition at the branch level in the future as digital acquisition increases.

The bank plans to open 130 branches during FY25 in districts where it does not have any presence.