SBI aims completion of core banking modernisation in 2 years: MD

New Delhi: State Bank of India (SBI), alongside its subsidiary SBI Payments Services, expects to complete the modernisation of its core-banking infrastructure in the next two years, a senior bank official has said.

Speaking at the Singapore FinTech Festival, SBI Managing Director (corporate banking & subsidiaries) Ashwini Kumar Tewari, outlined the bank's roadmap to transform its legacy systems through hollowisation, microservices, modernisation, and externalisation, while maintaining the continuity, trust, and resilience that define its operations.

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Elaborating on the approach, Tewari on Wednesday said SBI has been working on a four-axis strategy -- upgrading its hardware, migrating from Unix to Linux, hollowing out the core by externalising functions such as vendor and government payments, and introducing microservices for operations like inquiries and accounting.

These initiatives, he said, are helping the bank re-architect its core systems for greater agility and scale.

Further underlining the technological shift, he said that SBI is also building a private cloud infrastructure to ensure scalability while maintaining regulatory compliance and data security.

"We are modernising as we run the ship. Our systems must always remain on and available to customers," he said, adding that the bank's focus on uninterrupted service continuity.

Discussing SBI's evolving partnership model with the fintech ecosystem, he said the narrative has moved from competition to collaboration.

To encourage innovation, SBI has developed a sandbox and innovation hub, opening access to nearly 300 APIs that allow fintechs to test and integrate their solutions with SBI's systems.

Along with agility, convenience, intuitiveness, interface, security and compliance, the ability to meet the scale of SBI's operations is a crucial parameter for fintech onboarding, he added.

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