Sunita Handa, CGM – IT Channels & Operations, at State Bank of India, narrates how the bank prepared its manpower and technology to meet the unprecedented crisis caused by covid-19:
Manoj Agrawal: Outbreak of the life-threatening covid-19 and the nationwide lockdown to contain its exponential spread: what did it mean for the Global IT Centre of State Bank of India, India’s largest bank?
Sunita Handa: Banking is categorized as an essential service. In all phases of the lockdown, banks were expected to provide uninterrupted services to their customers through their branch and non-branch channels. While the medical and police personnel are trained and equipped to work in such circumstances, the same is not true for bankers. They had to learn by themselves the dos & don’ts for the situation, whole heartedly work towards the BCCP, or Business Continuity with Change Planning, and run the show courageously, calmly and as seamlessly as possible. In these difficult times, the Global IT Centre (GITC) had to enable SBI’s brave corona warriors manning the branch and CSP counters to deliver efficiently, by keeping all the systems up and running. The non-branch/digital channels, apart from being convenient, are ‘healthy’ options for bank transactions. These channels must run non-stop, whatever be the obstacles.
Further, for the government to deliver its relief packages to the target groups, be it the financial inclusion customers or the MSMEs, the single most important channel is the banks, which must facilitate this with efficient tech operations and systematic branch operations.
SBI, being a leader in all of the above, it was absolutely essential to strengthen the safety net and backups of human and tech resources at our GITC.
So, how was that safety net arranged to keep the show running without any disruption?
I will just touch upon the key areas where we changed our normal route (that’s why I called it BCCP):
- In normal course, our 24×7 teams attending to operations, channels and other critical functions work in 3 shifts from the same premises in the primary setup. We immediately divided them into 2 or 3 sub-teams and spread them in different buildings so that in case one building got quarantined, others would be available.
- Intranet was extended to the residential colony and more than a hundred workstations were set up so that in the worst-case scenario, we could have operated from our colony.
- Bare minimum staff and vendor resources for running the essential services were identified. All arrangements were put in place for this group of resources to ensure that they do not have any problems in attending to work. The arrangements included special buses (with specific permissions to ply) for pick up and drop, stay in near-to-office staff colony, food at office and colony, and liaising with police and municipal authorities for procuring passes for commuting to office.
- Sanitizers, masks, zero-touch access systems, deep-cleaning and fumigation of premises accepted as new normal.
- Regular communication with staff to allay fears, to spread the dos and don’ts regarding social distancing and personal hygiene and to invite their suggestions on the plans the management was implementing to overcome the challenges.
- Simultaneously, fast-tracked the enablement of ‘Work from Home’ or rather ‘Work from Anywhere’ through VPN and other systems.
How was the overall attendance of the bank and outsourced staff running the Navi Mumbai datacenter? Compared to normal times, what percentage of staff was actually working from office during the lockdown?
Let me tell you, each day brought a new story. We had more that 25% attendance on the days when Navi Mumbai was considered less affected and also had the days with only 10-15% attendance when spurt in positive cases in the region hit the headlines and the police and the NMMC became stricter in their allowance for movement of people. What helped us was our timely identification of some 800 odd resources out of total 6000 plus, who are required to run the bare minimum operations. On each single day, it was ensured that these resources or their backups are working smoothly, from office or remotely. Work on new and larger projects was taken up only selectively.
Was there any re-distribution of workload among main DC, near-DC and DR site?
During sudden disruptions in business, banks usually focus on technology and telecom infrastructure for BCP. But in this case, the ‘people’ dimension became critical since it is the people who are affected by the virus or are unavailable and not the IT or telecom infrastructure. Keeping infra at the near-DC and DR centres in pink of health is, of course, important, but that is for those scenarios when the primary DC becomes inaccessible, say due to a resource working there testing positive leading to requirement of closing down the DC premises for fumigation or special sanitization.
Banks are highly security conscious (have to be!) as far as technology is concerned. Work from home was not the norm. What challenges were faced when SBI GITC took a call to implement it in record short span?
Any work from home environment will face the following challenges:
- The remote connection has to be absolutely secure leaving no scope for breach by hackers / cyber-attackers;
- Safe, private and secure environment on the side of our resource, leaving no scope for shoulder surfing or view/misuse of data by an unauthorized party;
- Absence of face-to-face meetings for deliberations, brainstorming where process flows etc. are explained with the help of white boards and manual drawings;
- Arrangement of required devices and infra;
- Policies, SOPs and SLAs didn’t cover work from home scenarios.
However, since coping with the current crisis situation required an interim operating model with mix of essential people working from office, most others working from home the same was made possible in a speedy but totally secured manner, taking care of all of the above concerns.
Were any steps taken to harden the computers that the employees would be using at their homes for work?
Hardening of computers was the foremost requirement for enabling VPNs. New laptops were acquired for hardening and many existing ones were also done. A small team started this work and later many more resources were trained by them for the job. Our Information Security Team, which has earlier not been in favour of working remotely, joined hands with this group to oversee the security aspects and gave valuable inputs to make the task secured and speedier. Since hardening of devices had dependency on procurement and required lot of time-investment, other secured methods were also adopted in the interim for remote working.
Please give examples of additional services and efforts put in by IT companies to help SBI’s IT systems running smoothly during the lockdown.
The challenge that came at the very initial stages of the lockdown was that the private sector IT firms working with us thought that they do not come under essential services. However, when it was clarified directly and later, also through the home ministry that the vendor partners of banking services will be exempted (like bankers themselves) from lockdown, they came around and their teams were instructed to help the bank run the show. We got exceptional help in implementing the new changes announced by the government in the wake of pandemic (interest deferment, DBT with new criteria, multi-modal integration for PMCares account, etc.) Work from home was whole heartedly welcomed by most of our vendor partners. They also offered support to make it possible.
When the lockdown was announced, development work on our mobile app YonoGlobal for customers of SBI (Mauritius) Ltd was at final stages. Since demand for the mobile app was likely to surge during the lockdown, our teams along with the vendor partners fast tracked the remaining work despite the covid situation and successfully launched the app on 15th May 2020. Customers have applauded the timely release of the app with a high 4.9 rating on the Playstore.
What has been the change in usage among various customer servicing channels? Which channel/app has emerged as the champion during the lockdown?
Activities on tech-channels can be divided into two broad categories. The first category covers account status, inquiry, mini-statement and sporadic funds transfer related activities which see an upward trend when people earlier using branch or CSP channels for these services start migrating to digital modes. In the second category, we have the usage of digital channels for commercial activities; e-Commerce, m-Commerce and p-Commerce (POS swipes and QRs) which is pushed upward by demand & supply of goods and services in the ecosystem. You would have seen category two throughput increasing many-fold during the festive season or announcement of BIG SALES by certain merchants or market places.
During the covid lockdown, many more people got the inclination as well as the time to try digital. So, our non-transactional mobile service SBIQuick experienced a 100% increase in inquiry related transactions. Another champion channel has been our SBI YonoBusiness application, a one-stop solution (Dear Corporate, You Only Need One) for all kinds of transaction banking needs of our non-individual customers; right from a proprietary firm to MSME to large corporates. This segment is mostly slow in migrating to digital due to requirement of change in their internal administration style. Many corporates have dedicated staff to visit bank branches to do their banking transactions manually or through cheques. However, coronavirus and the lock-down has changed all that. Corporates are learning new ways to access their account and transact in them digitally. We are not surprised to see the YonoBusiness logins doubling up when compared with the normal. Apart from these applications, the increase in DBT credits by around 50% has pushed the AEPS (Aadhaar Enabled Payment System – mostly used by FI customers) channel transactions up by around 40%.
Coming to the category 2 activities, since spending has taken a dip due to requirement of social distancing and closing of markets, malls and shops selling non-essential goods, the use of card on POS machines has gone down by as much as 70%. Number of cash withdrawal transactions on our ATMs and cash deposits in our CDMs in the month of April 2020 were less than 50% of the normal numbers for a month. Financial transactions through UPI and mobile banking have also witnessed downturn of around 20%. With online commerce for travel / hotel booking and eShopping taking a hit, the CNP (Card Not Present) / eCommerce transactions has come down by 30%. Downward trend is observed in money transfers through IMPS, NEFT and RTGS too. The trends are the same for the entire banking system.
Which internal communication channel has emerged as a champion during the lockdown? Were any additional measures taken to secure this channel further?
The mantra for internal communication during the lockdown situation has been ‘Socially Distant but Digitally Closer’. We have been using our internal video conferencing system as also the Microsoft Teams platform earlier too, but the covid scenario introduced us to their wider capabilities and hitherto unknown features. These platforms have been extensively used with our Information Security department always keeping an eye on their robustness and strength.
Was any covid testing undertaken for family members of IT staff?
We have been fortunate in this regard. Immediate tests were carried out in 2 cases that were reported positive and it was found to our relief that no spread has taken place. We are hopeful of surpassing this covid challenge together very soon and navigate into the virtual and virtuous digital world.
