United Bank of India Taking Reforms to the State Level Multi-level Consultation and Ideation Holding of State Level Inter Bank Group Consultation
The first stage of bottom-up consultative process designed to generate ideas and review performance of banks and their alignment with national priorities, was conducted at the Regional Level on18th August, 2019 by United Bank of India, involving all branchesat the concerned Regional Office of the Bank.
Taking it forward to State Level, United Bank of India, as Convener of SLBC West Bengal & Tripura, conducted State Level Inter Bankers’ Meet on 22nd& 23 Aug,2019 at Kolkata & Agartala which was participated by Zonal Heads/State Heads of all the PSBs.
The said Meet at Kolkata was presided by Shri Ashok Kumar Pradhan, MD &CEO, United Bank of India, in the presence of Shri Sanjay Kumar, ED, UBI, Shri Ranjan Kumar Mishra, CGM, SBI, L.H.O., Kolkata & Shri J.P. Tirkey, GM, FIDD, RBI-Kolkata & Shri Awadhesh Kumar, GM, NABARD, Kolkata. The similar Meet held at Agartala was presided by Shri Ajit Kumar Das, ED.
This was a first of its kind consultation where the State Level Bankers were themselves asked to review their performance, deliberate on the issues before the banking sector, and ideate on future strategy and the way forward. The meet focused on the ways and means to increase credit to various sectors of the economy, enhance use of technology to bring about innovation and enable big data analytics, and make banking citizen-centric as well as more responsive to the needs and aspirations of senior citizens, farmers, small industrialists, entrepreneurs, youth, students and women.
The following nine thematic papers by domain experts on various challenges facing the banking sector, were discussed during the meet with a view to suggest reforms in Public Sector Banks (PSBs), and the future roadmap for them:
- Increasing digital payments
- Corporate Governance in PSBs
- Credit for India’s MSMEs
- Use of Technology in PSBs
- Retail Lending – A Great
Opportunity
- Agriculture Credit
- Export Credit in India
- Need to Establish Financial Grid
- Enabling Bank Credit towards a $5 Tn Economy.
As a result of the consultations, a number of implementable and innovative suggestions came up on how PSBs can improve their performance and the road map was prepared for the future.
These suggestions were collated along with comparative performance assessment of all the Banks in the State. Final ConsultativeProcess will now be held at the National level to ascertain both intra and inter-bank ranking and to deliberate on the suggestions and draft an approach on “Way forward” to further improve the performance of the PSBs.
The consultative process has resulted in a renewed sense of involvement and purpose down to the branch level /regional level and the bank is geared towards implementing the roadmap for the future, improve its performance, and align itself to national priorities so that it may fulfil its mandate of partnering the Indian growth story.