The Semi-Finalists: SBI's Project CINB SARAL

The bank deploys a single user transactional banking product to empower SMEs & single man businesses to carry out their daily transactions online, pay taxes, EPF, ESIC & other statutory payments in a simplified manner

State Bank has a few parallels anywhere in the world when it comes to its size, reach, footprint, volumes handled and complexities of operations and technology, with over 19000 branches in the country and 161 offices across 33 countries. The bank's Internet banking portal 'OnlineSBI' has 7.8 mn registered users. Owing to its reach across the length and breadth of the country, the bank has a large clientele base of micro and small enterprises. These MSMEs were not able to enjoy the benefits of existing corporate Internet banking products offered by SBI, hence a new product called SARAL was introduced for them by the bank.

SARAL was implemented using technologies like J2EE, Spring Framework,JSP, and JSTL. The operating system they used in this is Solaris 10, and other software used includes Veritas Storage Foundation Suite 4.0, Oracle Enterprise Manager, IBM http server (IHS), etc.

Empowering MSMEs

SARAL is a simplified, single user, transactional product that empower.

MSMEs to do corporate banking, keeping their needs in mind. Essentailly, MSMEs comprise of sole proprietorship concerns and single man businesses or small business units who do not have adequate staff to handle multiple roles required for CINB facilities. SARAL enables any Panwala or retail Kiranawala to avail the facilities of corporate Internet banking. This meets their need for carrying out most of their daily banking requirements including online fund transfers. Small entrepreneurs can pay all taxes, EPF, ESIC and other statutory payments in a simplified manner.

SARAL at a glance

Here are a few things that SARAL enables MSMEs to do:

- Single user product, similar to retail Internet banking.

- Transaction rights are available by default to SARAL users.

- Fund transfer between own accounts — limit of `5 Lacs per day; third party fund transfer (both intra bank and inter bank) with a limit of `5 Lacs per day.

- Tax payments: per day limit of 2 Cr. for CBDT and CBEC and 10 Lacs for other tax payments.

- Facility for merchant payments.

- EPFO Payment.

The Result

The implementation has resulted in increased number of transactions through Internet banking, thereby leading to reduction in footfalls at the branches and leveraging on lower transaction costs to the bank. Now small retailers can enjoy the benefits of corporate facilities with SARAL.

More than 55,000 SBI SME customers across the country have registered for Saral and the number is growing. The total number of transactions that has happened till date is over Rs 12.35 Lakh and are worth Rs 27,352 Cr ever since its launch in the mid of 2011.

As transaction cost through branch is about Rs 37 compared with the transaction cost through Internet Banking at Rs 7, migration of customers to internet banking resulted in substantial cost savings to the bank. Plus, since customer visits to the branches for routine banking have reduced, they can now focus on their core activities.

We talked to an SME customer of SARAL to understand if it's really benefitting small business units. 'It's really good. We don't need to go to bank for minor transactions, cheques or other purpose. We can do it online'. says Narendra Kumar of Guwahati who runs a business with 20 people.