- Meetings held across all 524 regional business offices
- Consultative meetings with branch managers, regional managers and top bank executives.
- Meetings conducted to generate ideas and consultation process at all levels
- Campaign generated new ideas and suggestions to be deliberated upon
With the changing times and private banks — HDFC, ICICI, AXIS and others — giving it tough competition, State Bank of India (SBI), the largest commercial bank with the largest network of branches in the country, feels it imperative to improve service and performance.
The bank conducted a discussion session with branches within the jurisdiction of all 524 regional offices to generate ideas and review its performance aligned with its national priorities. The first-of-its-kind discussion, which took place on August 17 and 18, deliberated on efforts in designing the first stage of the bank’s bottom-up consultative process.
In West Bengal, Sikkim and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the meetings took place at 17 centres where regional managers and branch managers of 33 regions of the bank participated in the exercise under the leadership of the top management.
At the State Bank Institute of Leadership (SBIL), Rajarhat, in Kolkata, six regions of the Kolkata Circle participated in the discussions, led by Rajnish Kumar, Chairman, SBI, and Ranjan Kumar Mishra, Chief General Manager, SBI, Kolkata Circle, along with the circle’s top officials.
Ways to improve performance
The primary objective of this meeting was to identify, and finalise, ways and means to increase credit to various sectors of the economy, enhance the use of technology to bring about innovation and enable big data analytics and make banking citizen-centric, especially more responsive to the needs and aspirations of senior citizens, farmers, small industries, enterprises, youths, students and women.
SBI collectively identified many implementable and innovative suggestions which could help improve the bank’s performance and establish the future roadmap.
These suggestions were collated and have been sent for further discussions at the SLBC/state level, along with a comparative performance assessment of the branches under each region. Later, the bank decided to hold the final consultation at the national level to compare both intra- and inter-bank performances and to finalise the suggestions regarding the way ahead for implementation across PSBs.
The consultative process resulted in a renewed sense of involvement percolating down to the branch level and the bank is now geared towards implementing the roadmap for further improvement of its performance and aligning itself with its national priorities so that it may fulfil its mandate of partnering the Indian growth story.
