The department of posts now has a core banking system that is bigger than that of SBI, Union IT and communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has said.
The minister’s statement comes at a time when IndiaPost is in the process of launching a payments bank. Infosys had bagged a multi-year Rs 700-crore deal from the department to implement its core banking solution Finacle connecting 1.5 lakh post offices with 20 crore customer accounts in 2012.
Until now, SBI’s core banking system implemented by TCS was the largest in the country and also the largest centralized core system implementation ever undertaken. The bank has 16,498 branches and 57,986 ATMs. India Post migrated 16640 Post Offices into CBS platform until 15.02.2016. By the end of this financial year, India Post will migrate nearly 25000 Post Offices to CBS.
However, even this large network pales in comparison to IndiaPost’s network. While the post office has a larger network, the accounts are more in the nature of savings and SBI’s core system is much more complex as it handles millions of transactions every day. The bank has also built a data warehousing and analytics layer over the core banking platform whereas IndiaPost has completed the first leg of networking.
Speaking at a special session at the Make in India week, Prasad said that the department would soon launch a payments bank. The minister said that around 60 domestic and international entities had evinced interest in partnering with the department. Prasad launched a ‘fund-of-funds’ aimed at helping startups from the electronics and IT sector create intellectual property. The government would invest up to Rs 2,200 crore in the initiative which would be in the form of a public-private partnership. The Electronic Development Fund is floated by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology.
how much effective?? not a single day has passed when transactions took place flawlessly. link failure, server slowness has created frustration.