BoM organizes banks meet on Consultation, Ideation

24/8/2019

PUNE: Eighteen Public Sector Banks came together as part of second round of the ideation exercise to further streamline the banking sector to become a $5-trillion economy in five years. The inter-bank meeting, held under the aegis of the State Level Bankers’ Committee (SLBC) organised by Bank of Maharashtra, convener, SLBC, Maharashtra State.
 

A S Rajeev, MD and CEO A C Rout, Hemant Tamta, Executive Directors, Bank of Maharashtra, J R Menon, Director, Accounts, Treasury, Govt. of Maharashtra, U D Shirsalkar, CGM, NABARD, State heads of all 18 PSBs, Ms. Sujata Iyer, Joint Director, Dept. of Economics,  Statistics, Govt. of Maharashtra and M K Moon from RBI were present in the SLBC meeting.

A S Rajeev, MD and CEO, Bank of Maharashtra said that first stage of the bottom-up consultation process designed to generate ideas and review performance of Banks and their alignment with national priorities was conducted at the Regional Level on 17 th and 18 th August,  2019 by all Public Sector Banks, involving all branches within their Regions’ jurisdiction. 

This was a first of kind consultation, where the branches were asked to review their performance, deliberate on the issues before the Banking sector and indicate on future strategies and the way forward for the economy to achieve Govt.’s aim of a $ 5 trillion Economy by 2024-25. He explained that 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, exporters, youth, students and women. 

Rajeev also opined that all are aware that the state is badly affected by continuous drought as a result of which the recovery climate has been affected and resultantly the credit off take under Agriculture sector is hampered. For the first time since nationalization of the banking sector, the government has embarked on an initiative of bottom up ideation approach and sought suggestions from branch level managers on how the banking sector could be streamlined to fuel economic growth. The consultations during the two days generated a number of Implementable and Innovative suggestions, which will be collated and presented during the National Level Consultation Meet, on how PSBs may improve their performance and what the Road Map for the future.

In these two days, performance of various PSBs operating in the State was evaluated across various important parameters and interbank discussions were held on specific issues such as Credit support for economic growth including infrastructure and agriculture, MSME and Mudra, Retail Credit, Digital economy, Financial Inclusion and priorities and issues relating to banks in Maharashtra State.