Month: March 2021

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has asked banks to extend Cheque Truncation System (CTS) across all their branches in the country.

This is aimed at leveraging the availability of CTS and providing uniform customer experience, irrespective of location of her/his bank branch

Cheque truncation involves the stoppage of the physical movement of the cheque and the replacement of physical instrument by the image/s of the instrument and the corresponding data contained in MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) line.

The RBI directed banks to inform it about their roadmap to achieve pan-India coverage of CTS and submit a status report before April 30, 2021.

“To facilitate this (CTS), banks shall have to ensure that all their branches participate in image-based CTS under respective grids by September 30, 2021.

“They are free to adopt a model of their choice, like deploying suitable infrastructure in every branch, or following a hub and spoke model, and concerned banks shall coordinate with the respective Regional Offices of RBI to operationalise this,” said the RBI in a circular.

The central bank observed that CTS has been in use since 2010 and presently covers around 1.50 lakh branches. All the erstwhile 1219 non-CTS clearing houses (ECCS centres) have been migrated to CTS effective September 2020.

“It is, however, seen that there are branches of banks that are outside any formal clearing arrangement and their customers face hardships due to longer time taken and cost involved in collection of cheques presented by them,” the circular said..

India, on Monday, emerged the third country after the US and China to complete three crore Covid-19 vaccinations, even though the rise in fresh cases continued to be a cause of concern.

According to the Health Ministry, till Monday evening, States and Union Territories across the country administered over 3.15 crore Covid-19 vaccine shots in the country, helping India scale yet another landmark. The US and China, the countries that commenced the vaccinations much earlier than India, carried out 10.7 crore and 5.25 crore vaccinations, respectively, till Sunday.

India is also witnessing yet another surge in Covid-19 cases. On Sunday, the number of fresh Covid-19 cases reported in the country was 26,291 – nearly 1,000 more than the previous day. Five States – Maharashtra, Punjab, Karnataka, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu – accounted for over 78 per cent of these new cases, which took the total number of active cases to 2,19,262. With this, the cumulative Covid-19 cases in the country inched closer to 1.14 crore, of which, over 1.1 crore recovered while close to 1.59 lakh succumbed to the infection till date.

Highest daily cases

Maharashtra reported the highest daily new cases of 16,620 – 63 per cent of all new cases – followed by Kerala (1,792) and Punjab (1,492).

According to the Health Ministry, a rising trajectory of daily new cases is visible in eight States. In addition to five States mentioned earlier, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi, too, witnessed a rising trend. Kerala, on the other hand, has been seeing a consistent declining trend last one month, the ministry statement said.

At 2,19,262, India’s total active caseload now stands at 1.93 per cent of the total positive cases. Around 77 per cent of these active cases are in three States – Maharashtra, Kerala and Punjab. Maharashtra alone accounts for more than 58 of the total active cases in the country.

SBI Card has, to a large extent, been able to come out of the Covid-19 crisis unscathed, said its new Managing Director & CEO, Rama Mohan Rao Amara.

Contactless payments rise

He also said that contactless payments have taken wings with increased adoption by its customers and account for 25 per cent of the overall transactions through its cards.

“If I look at this spends wise, industry was able to reach pre-Covid levels of spends in November last year, while we were able to get back in October itself and that way we were ahead. If you look at the market share on cards and spends, it has improved steadily year-on-year. Profitability was impacted marginally because credit costs had gone up due to Covid-19. But we continued to be profitable even during the lockdown months. It is only a matter of time before we reach the normal trends of profitability,” Amara told BusinessLine.

This was his first media interaction after assuming charge at the helm of SBI Card on January 30 this year. Amara had moved to SBI Card after being part of its parent State Bank of India for almost three decades in several key assignments, both in India and abroad.

Asserting that SBI Card was aiming for sustainable growth, Amara expressed confidence about the robustness of the business model, and noted that both medium- and long-term prospects are completely intact. Barring the moratorium pool, rest of the portfolio is performing in business-as-usual fashion, and SBI Card was at pre-Covid levels in terms of delinquency, he added.

He said that SBI Card continued to focus on new customer acquisitions even during the lockdown months. “In fact, in the third quarter, we were doing 10,000 new customers a da,y which was on a par with the typical run rate before Covid-19,” he said.

The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) move to double the spend limit for contactless credit card payment to ₹5,000 from ₹2,500 has helped increase the adoption of such mode of payments. This has enabled SMEs to accept digital payments for larger ticket transactions. “During Covid-19, the concern was about touching things. That is where contactless payments came in handy. No need to punch or swipe your card, just wave and go,” he noted.

Net profit

For the quarter ended December 31, 2020, SBI Card had reported a net profit of ₹210 crore on a total come of ₹2,540 core. For the nine months period ended December 31, 2020, profit after tax stood at ₹809 crore on a total income of ₹7,245 crore.