New data centre infrastructure accelarates cheque clearing of State Bank of India

"We are currently handling over 100,000 cheque instruments per day at approximately double the previous capacity. This has resulted in a significant enhancement in customer satisfaction and better retention."

Mr. LM Mishra, Assistant General Manager, Information Technology Services Department, State Bank of India

The customer

The State Bank of India (SBI) is an Indian multinational providing public sector banking and financial services. Headquartered in Mumbai, it is a government-owned corporation with assets of US$388 billion and 17,000 branches, including 190 foreign offices, making it the largest banking and financial services company in India by assets. The bank traces its ancestry through the Imperial Bank of India to the founding, in 1806, of the Bank of Calcutta, making it the oldest commercial bank in the Indian Subcontinent.

The challenge

SBI’s earlier installed base was operating in a distributed architecture spread across multiple locations which used to take days to clear each cheque instrument while information was not readily available centrally.

The solution

The bank engaged Fujitsu, along with application vendor NCR, to centralise this system into one data centre that provides near instant cheque clearing combined with total data visibility of its inventory.

The benefit

Over 100,000 cheque instruments per day are now processed 50 per cent more quickly, boosting customer satisfaction and reducing the number of complaints
Data can be scrutinised and analysed in real-time, allowing SBI to react more quickly to market changes and make smarter business decisions
Internal users have become more productive, courtesy of the added efficiency introduced by the solution
Thanks to Fujitsu systems, SBI has total reliability with no downtime yet recorded
The centralised data centre has contributed to the improvement of the management of the cheque truncation system and enhanced productivity