Creating India's Cashless Economy
January 22, 2018 • Blog Post • Som Satsangi, Managing Director, HPE India
IN THIS ARTICLE
- "Digital India" is a campaign that encourages technology development and increased government services citizens online
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi progressed the initiative by urging Indians to transform to a "cashless" society
- By extending digital banking services to more people in India, State Bank of India supports citizens' opportunities to prosper in the global economy
State Bank of India's journey to becoming a technology company with a banking license
As a nation of 1.3 billion people, India is emerging as a global economic powerhouse. In fact, economic growth has averaged seven percent a year from 1997 to 2016. Alongside this strong economic trajectory, the country is implementing progressive new programs with its citizens well-being at the very center.
One major change is "Digital India" – a campaign that encourages technology development and increased government services citizens online. In 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi progressed the initiative by urging Indians to transform to a "cashless" society.
State Bank of India (SBI) is the nations largest and oldest bank with 470 million customers and 27 percent of Indias bank market share. As a government-run entity, it serves a social mission, including support of the Digital India initiative; when the government launched the initiative, 55 percent of that load fell on SBI.
Skyrocketing growth combined with the rise of new digital channels called for IT transformation of a magnitude SBI had never before experienced. SBI's account base quickly grew from 500 million to 750 million, and continued growth remains on the horizon. Bank systems must be ready to support up to two billion accounts, along with the resulting data explosion.
Although SBI has steadily upgraded its technology infrastructure over the years, the bank needed its IT data center footprint re-designed and equipped for next-generation capabilities to support new and growing digital services such as SBIs mobile wallet. To these ends, SBI partnered with HPE to reinvent its IT technology stack and data center architecture to obtain lower cost and greater adaptability.
Through its new infrastructure, SBI hosts e-banking and e-trade services as part of its global expansion while meeting compliance requirements of dozens of regulators worldwide. Although not all future demands on the bank can be predicted today, the new modular data center architecture is flexible to grow in line with the SBI business.
By extending digital banking services to more people in India, SBI supports citizens' opportunities to prosper in the global economy. As increasing banking opportunities bring India's 1.3 billion people into the country's thriving economy, SBIs new high availability infrastructure is helping the bank add new customers and escalate mobile banking adoption by providing massive scalability, business agility, security and a seamless experience for customers around the world.