New Delhi: Nearly 72 percent of financial transactions of Public Sector Banks (PSBs) are now done through digital channels, with customers active on digital channels having doubled from 3.4 crore in FY 2019-20 to 7.6 crore in FY 2020-21. This was stated by Union Minister of State for Finance Dr Bhagwat Kisanrao Karad in a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha Tuesday.

The Minister stated, however, that the license for banking is given by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and RBI has informed that it is not considering a separate licensing category for digital banks at present.

The Minister in his reply enlisted a number of steps that have been taken to facilitate digital banking:

• Enhanced access to mobile banking and Internet banking has been enabled through an increase in the PSB average for the number of services offered (43), customer-friendly features (135) and regional languages available on the customer interface (8).
• End-to-end automated digital lending has been introduced in larger PSBs for unsecured personal loans (in five PSBs), loans to micro-enterprises ("Shishu Mudra", in five PSBs) and renewals of loans to micro, small and medium enterprises (in three PSBs).
• Digital retail loan request initiation through digital channels has been enabled in all the seven large PSBs, with retail disbursements from loan requests so initiated in the financial year FY 2020-21 amounting to Rs 40,819 crore.
• Customer-need-driven, analytics-based credit offers have been given an impetus, resulting in Rs. 49,777 crore of fresh retail loan disbursements by the seven larger PSBs in FY2020-21.

The Government's Jeevan Pramaan initiative for pensioners has enabled pensioners the facility to update their annual life certificate online.

Initiation of digital lending has been made contactless through PSBloansin59minutes.com, using triangulation of credit bureau, income-tax and goods and services tax (GST) data, to provide online in-principle approval for loans to Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), home loans, personal loans and automobile loans.

Online bill discounting for MSMEs has been enabled on a competitive basis through the on-boarding of PSBs onto the Trade Receivables Discounting System (TReDS) platform.

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