Innovate, lead amid changing global landscape: Finance Minister Sitharaman to banks

Exhorting the banking sector to continue innovating and leading amid changing global landscape, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday exuded confidence that the country’s largest bank State Bank of India (SBI) will embrace technology, sustainability and inclusivity as its guiding principles.

Launching the platinum jubilee celebrations of SBI's foundation day in Mumbai, the Finance Minister said the SBI has continuously evolved to meet the changing landscape and retained its position as a market leader despite regulatory tightening.

Sitharaman said the world is changing rapidly, and the banking sector must continue to innovate and also to lead. “I am confident that SBI will rise to the occasion embracing technology, sustainability and inclusivity as its guiding principles,” she said, while lauding the SBI for reinventing its personal distribution channels to align with evolving customer expectations.

The Finance Minister noted that the SBI has become more agile and competitive than ever before being the largest commercial bank in the world’s most populous nation, catering approximately to about 5.6 per cent of the global population.

“SBI, the largest bank in the Indian subcontinent, is now ideally positioned to deliver superior value creation through sustainable growth,” she said, while urging the SBI to achieve this by enhancing its operational excellence across lending performance, asset quality, profitability and capital generation, thereby driving wealth creation.

“SBI has bolstered its infrastructure, established a robust monitoring and control framework, and built a talent pool of committed professionals to power these efforts,” Sitharaman said, while adding that the bank has re-engineered its internal processes to improve risk management and accelerate growth velocity.

Constituted by an Act of Parliament on July 1, 1955, the SBI’s customer base rose to more than 51 crore with total business growth touching Rs 87 lakh crore and staff strength breaching the 2.37 lakh mark over the last 70 years.