Over the next few months PSBA plans to offer more than 25+ services across retail, MSME and wealth segments across 7000+ centers covering the length and breadth of the country:
PSB Alliance is an umbrella organization for 12 public sector banks, each owning approximately 8.33% share in its capital. It focuses on driving common initiatives on behalf of all the 12 public sector banks, by providing them with a common platform and the latest technological solutions in a safe, secure, in a cost-effective manner.
Rajinder Mirakhur, Managing Director & CEO, PSB Alliance, explains: “It can act as an intermediary for all the PSBs and create a common applications/platform by drawing on the experience and inputs from these banks and taking advantage of the combined scale of operations. This will help the PSBs to lower their cost of acquiring new business platforms/technologies and at the same time will benefit their customers to have access to the latest technology coupled with standard robust processes.”
Core DSB, SCF Tech Platforms
Over the last few months, PSB Alliance has undertaken several strategic initiatives and built a lot of traction by undertaking some very complex projects for the public sector banking industry. Some of its key projects are very useful for a large base of customers, such as doorstep banking. Currently PSBA offers around 15 doorstep banking services across 100 centers. Over the next few months, it plans to offer 25+ services across retail, MSME and wealth segments across 7000+ centers across the country. It has already finalized the core DSB technology platform and has finalized the feet on street agents to rollout this initiative.
The digital supply chain finance (SCF) platform of PSB Alliance will allow all fintech players to connect to this platform, conduct all preliminary checks through third-party APIs and account aggregators and then pass the fintech sourced business to the internal systems of all PSBs based on pre-defined logic. The platform developed will have a robust mobile app, web portal, for all parties and include integrations with various third-party API providers, payment gateways, and account aggregators. The platform shall be robust and flexible enough to support multiple plugins and service providers to cater to future requirements also.
Rajinder adds: “We have chosen Veefin as the technology service provider to develop and manage this cloud-based platform on a high-availability technology architecture.”
Property Listing
PSBA is in the process of building a unified property listing and auction portal in line with market leading platform. Indian Banks Auctions Mortgaged Properties Information (IBAPI) portal is an initiative of Indian Banks Association (IBA) under the overarching policy of the Department of Financial Services (DFS), Ministry of Finance to provide a common platform to display details of mortgaged properties to be auctioned online by banks, starting with public sector banks.
Prospective buyers may use this portal to search and view details of properties and participate in the auction process.
PSBA is in the final stages of appointing a vendor to build a single unified property listing and auction portal and mobile app across the public sector banking industry. The portal and mobile app will offer advanced search and listing options and will be integrated to the public sector banks LMS system for buyers to avail of easy credit facilities.
PSBA has been appointed as the nodal agency for building the Balance Confirmation portal for auditors to get hassle free, tamper proof, and reliable digital balance confirmation certificates from banks. Rajinder adds: “PSBA is closely working with ICAI, IBA and IDRBT to develop this platform using block-chain technology. The platform is expected to go-live early next year and will be made available to the entire financial services industry in a phased manner.”
Cloud, Tie Ups, Consulting
The final RBI master directions on outsourcing of information technology services have been released in April 2023. Public cloud services have also been extensively covered in the guidelines. PSBA has taken up the project of creating a common public cloud infrastructure for the PSU banks using the current cloud service providers. The RFP and evaluation process for the same is underway and a committee of bankers and experts have been constituted to oversee the same.
As part of fintech collaborations, PSBA has onboarded 2 fintechs: SLO Technologies for agriculture collateral monitoring and Sarvatra Technologies for retail CBDC platform. Rajinder indicates: “SLO provides unique solution to effectively manage and monitor land parcels using AI and machine learning techniques and Sarvatra has been carefully chosen seeing the success delivered by them in the pilots chosen by RBI.”
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