Awards for Excellence 2017
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Few banks in the world have made greater efforts to reach those in poverty than State Bank of India (SBI). As chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya told Euromoney last year: “I have customers in the bank who have to be led by the hand to give their left thumb impression. When you dispense the money, you have to tell them the amount orally, because they can neither read nor write.”
Mandated by the state, SBI will not abandon these people just because it might be commercially expedient to do so, and in fact it has made it a stated mission to enable them through digital financial inclusion. Bhattacharya says she and State Bank of India are “proud torchbearers of a glorious tradition of social service.”
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| Arundhati Bhattacharya |
SBI’s award as best bank for corporate and social responsibility partly reflects the work of the SBI Foundation to improve the lot of the poor. In the 2015/16 financial year, it committed the equivalent of $21.6 million to priority areas, including healthcare and the improvement of childhood mortality rates, providing education more widely, empowering women, caring for senior citizens and improving sanitation. It is practical in its approach and uses the bank’s vast network as a lever. Recently, for example, it asked each of its 14 local head offices to adopt one district and build toilets for girls in all the schools in that district. Its SBI Youth for India initiative seeks to harness the brightest young minds in the country and get them to connect with rural communities. In many respects, the volunteering is more important than the relatively modest spending; a workforce of 277,000 people is a powerful engine of change when it is mobilized.
All of that is important, but more broadly Euromoney wanted to reward the work Bhattacharya has done for gender equality in India. This starts with her presence at the top: she is a role model to Indian women, proof of how high they can rise. It is also reflected in policy, such as a model through which a mortgage will be granted at a better rate if it is in the name of the woman in a household, a simple method of promoting financial inclusion for women. And it is also evident in Bhattacharya’s decision to merge the women-focused bank Bharatiya Mahila Bank, believing it can better achieve its objectives when combined with SBI’s infrastructure.
Bhattacharya and SBI are also at the heart of a powerful trend: the use of digital disruption to reach out to the unbanked. In this respect, the bank is only part of a much broader enterprise that goes from the Aadhaar national card to the Unified Payment Interface, both devices of the state rather than the private sector. But SBI has an important role to play here and its efforts have the potential to affect hundreds of millions of lives.
