State Bank of India ruled out a spike in bad loans following the mega merger that has catapulted the country’s largest lender into the top 50 globally with close to USD 500 billion balance sheet. SBI Chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya told reporters in Mumbai that SBI has created a CBS database of about 500 tera byte, which is likely to be the biggest Oracle database in the world. She said the focus in the first quarter will be more on consolidation, which is expected to be over by May 27, and the branch rationalization will start from the second quarter onwards.
Talking about the voluntary retirement scheme introduced for employees of five associate banks, Bhattacharya said that out of the 12,500 eligible staffers, 2,800 have already opted for the scheme that closes on April 5. She claimed that the merger will benefit associate banks’ customers in terms of lower interest rates and an additional bouquet of products and services.
She said the bank has undertaken an asset quality review (AQR) on its own, apart from the one mandated by the Reserve Bank in December 2015, in respect of all the common accounts as part of the merger process.
Effective April 1, the five associate banks — State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, State Bank of Hyderabad, State Bank of Mysore, State Bank of Patiala, State Bank of Travancore — as well as Bharatiya Mahila Bank have been merged with SBI, creating a global banking behemoth.