India Post to shake Nationalised Banks and Banking industry

The initiative of India Post to connect Post Offices through Core Banking Solution will shake the banking industry shortly.  Even though Post offices are doing Small saving activities as an agent of Ministry of Finance, they have the potential in terms of deposit backings, wide network across the country and strong employee support to shake the industry.

Post Office Savings Bank (POSB) which is called as Poor’s Bank has the major share of Deposits in India compared to any other banks.  Since India Post is a government Institution working without profit motive, getting the exact figures of deposits and number of account was difficult compared to full-fledged banks with corporate entity.  So till now the actual figure were unknown to everyone.

Now the scenario has been changed when Post Offices started getting migrated to Core Banking Solution.  When a Post Office gets migrated, the exact figures of number of accounts and total deposit amount will be generated.  Through this figures everyone can see the strength of Post Office Saving Bank in India.

India Post successfully migrated its first office to Core Banking in December 2013.  Like any others big public sector and private sector banks, India Post is using Finacle, the leading Core Banking Solution from Infosys for their banking renovation.  Now India Post has crossed a milestone of 2500 Post Offices in this new initiative. Till 14.05.2015 total of 2590 Post offices have been migrated to CBS platform.

India Post is planning to include 25000 plus Post Offices in Core Banking network with in few years.  By this mission all the departmental Post Offices will come under this CBS category Post Offices.  Now itself all these offices are computerised and they are doing banking transactions using Sanchay Post software. Even if we take number as 25000, the figure is not at all a small one when compared to other big Nationalised banks.

As per the Annual Report 2013-14 State Bank of India has only 16069 branches including 15869 domestic branches and 190 foreign branches. If we include the branches of Associate banks too, a count of about 5700 more branches will be added to this list.  Even after adding the associate banks to this list SBI have only 21769 branches across the world.  The second largest public sector bank is Punjab National Bank.  They are following far behind with only 6206 branches (6201 domestic branches and 5 foreign branches)

If we take the amount of deposit as criteria, India Post will again be the number one in the industry.  Only 2590 Post Offices have been migrated to Core Banking till 14.05.2015, but the value of deposits in these migrated offices crossed Rs.228496 Crores.  Total of 14.56 Crores account have been migrated to this new platform.   This is from only nearly 10% of total Post Offices to be migrated to Core Banking.  If we take the proportionate figure, deposits will surely cross 20 Lakh Cores rupees after migration of all computerised Post Offices.  State Bank of India have only deposit of rupees 13.94 Lakh Crores as per annual report 2013-14.  Number of branches and total deposit value of major nationalised banks are shown below for comparative analysis.

SL No	Name of Banks	No. of CBS branches (as on 31.03.2014)	Total Deposit ( in Crores)
1	India Post (POSB)	*25000	*20,68,574
2	State Bank of India	16069	13,94,409
3	Punjab National Bank	6206	4,51,397
4	Bank of Baroda	5062	5,68,894
5	Canara Bank	4755	4,20,723
6	Bank of India	4671	4,78,695
7	Central Bank of India	4336	2,40,069
8	Syndicate Bank	3251	2,12,343

*Projected figure

Commercial banks are attracting customers by giving value added services like ATM, Debit/Credit cards, Internet Banking, mobile banking, etc. Now most of the people are depending banks for such needs. In order to compete with commercial banks or for attracting new customers or giving more value to their account holders, India Post started various value added services like Internet Banking, Mobile Banking and ATM cum Debit card etc.  Now the more than 100 ATM counters have been installed in various parts of the country.  India Post has started giving Rupay Debit cards to its customers.  Department of Post is planning to install 2800 ATMs by the end of 2015.

Now these facilities can be availed just by opening a Savings Bank account with an initial deposit of Rs.50/-   This cannot be expected from any other banks as they are running on profit motive only.

By the end of 2015 CBS network of India Post may be connected to other banking networks and thereby a Post Office customer can make use of all the facilities (except loans) like interbank fund transfer ( NEFT and RTGS), ATM sharing, etc. 

If the value added services of India Post is a success, surely it will lose the customers of commercial banks. And in such circumstances people in the rural areas will not approach Banks, normally located in urban or semi-urban areas for transacting in SB accounts.  Now Savings Bank account in Post Office are not attractive only because of lack of availability of value added services like ATM, Debit cards, net banking,etc.  Now Department of Post is taking all efforts to fill this gap occurred in the past.

Finally expecting that today’s technological renovation of India Post will surely shake Indian Banking industry as a whole in near future in various ways.  Let us wait and see.