One can never say one's agenda is finished because what happens is that you start with an agenda and as you go on you keep adding to it. So, there has to be certain unfinished pieces of business, said Arundhati Bhattacharya, outgoing Chairman of State Bank of India (SBI).
Rightly so! And hence, on the last day of her four-year term at the bank, she said: “We have been through quite a turbulent time… (The bank’s) credit growth is not where we wanted it to. So that's an unfinished agenda.”
She hopes, "going forward you will see the results for the work we have done in the last few years".
A day before, Rajnish Kumar, Bhattacharya's successor, told the media that reviving credit growth and resolution of stressed assets will be his top priority.
Heading any bank and especially the public sector, during an economic scenario that India is currently facing, is always a difficult task and no leader can finish all the tasks by the time they leave the organisation.
The bank is also working on a digital product which has been delayed from July and will be delivered next month, Bhattacharya said in her last public interaction with reporters as SBI Chairman.
Post merger
Speaking about the after-effects of the merger of its associates and Bharatiya Mahila Bank with itself from April 1, 2017, the outgoing Chairman said, “Post the merger there were some customers who moved from the bank. But we are very quickly gaining ground. We had to take some short-term pains because the merging entities were a little unsure. They did not get access to the right system, they need new products…We are still training those employees. By December we will finish the training."
We are seeing these impact in the states where merger has happened. In the states where the merger has not happened our growth rate has not fallen, she added.
GST
SBI is also working on a model where it will give working capital loans based on your input and output and the GST returns.
She said the government’s Goods and Services Tax (GST) has huge benefits and will improve efficiency and the time taken to transfer the goods. "There are very big positives for GST. If we keep looking at difficulties, we will never understand are the positives."
She added that SBI has done everything possible to improve our understanding and monitoring of risk, of improving processes, our credit underwriting standards, our follow-up processes.
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