State Bank’s agents to soon visit branches incognito to monitor customer services

State Bank of India plans to take a leaf out of this history and engage the services of an external agency to visit incognito its branches to monitor customer services.

India’s largest lender plans to conduct this exercise on an annual basis. The bank had 22,405 domestic branches as of March end 2023.

“The importance of customer centricity in banking operations and building long-term relationships cannot be overstated. We need to understand the pulse of customers, keep on evolving with time, enhance our offerings and make customer experience of our bank as benchmark in the industry,” said Chairman Dinesh Kumar Khara.

Already, RBI’s officers have been making incognito visits to bank branches to assess of the level of customer service provided.

SBI also plans to build KaaS (KYC as a Service) for better management of KYC (know your customer) profiling of the customers.

The RBI has directed Regulated Entities to follow ‘KYC Guidelines’, in terms of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002, whereby certain personal information of the customer is obtained. The KYC policy of a bank usually has four components — customer acceptance policy, risk management, customer identification procedures and monitoring of transactions.