The country’s largest lender, State Bank of India, plans to double the registration for its digital-banking app Yono within the next six months, from the current base of 24 million.
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought to focus the value of contact-less digital banking channels. SBI Yono has achieved sizeable growth through the digital route by increasing the share of wallet and acquiring scale, SBI chairman Rajnish Kumar said while addressing shareholders at the lender's annual general meeting today.
The bank will further scale up Yono and has set a target of doubling user registrations within the next six months. It would further strengthen the platform through new product offerings such as end-to-end home loans, pre-approved car loans and personal gold loans, he added.
An integrated digital and lifestyle platform by SBI, Yono has crossed the milestone of 51 million downloads and has 24 million registered users. It has five million logins a day and over 4,000 daily disbursals of personal loans.
SBI recently launched the Yono Global app in the UK and Mauritius and plans to cover nine more nations by 2020-end.
SBI also gave Yono a brick-and-mortar presence on June 30, with the launch of one Yono branch each in Navi Mumbai, Indore and Gurugram, on a pilot basis.
On dealing with effects of Covid-19, the SBI chairman said it was still playing out, and that FY21 will be a challenging year for the bank like any other lender. However, he asserted that the bank is well prepared to deal with such challenges.
An elaborate business continuity plan is already in place. Business continuity hub branches have been identified to cater to customers in case of emergency and BCP sites identified to support essential backend services.
Kumar said Covid-19 has highlighted the need for human resources BCP. The focus, going forward, will be on cost reduction and rationalisation. The reskilling of workforce, improving staff productivity and redeployment of workforce from admin offices to sales roles will also engage attention of management.
SBI will institute Work-from-Anywhere (WFA) infrastructure to facilitate work from any location, while taking care of the social aspects of work-life balance. The measure is expected to save Rs 1,000 crore through cost optimisation and will be a key component of our business continuity during the times of Covid-19, he added.