State Bank of India will add up to 5,000 ATMs in FY2015. The bank’s managing director A. Krishna Kumar said the addition to the existing network would help improve the ratio of debit cards to ATMs in the country. He said SBI has a ratio of about 2,500 cards per ATM while other banks have a ratio of 1,500-1,700 per machine. Due to this, there are long queues at SBI ATMs and customers go to other banks’ ATMs located nearby to save time, and SBI gets charged for those transactions. Currently, customers are allowed five free transactions a month at other bank ATMs, but at the backend, the bank pays for every transaction a customer has made at another bank’s ATM. At the end of FY2014, SBI had 43,515 ATMs and it paid an interchange fee of Rs 991 crore to other banks as the number of its customers using other bank ATMs was more than customers of other banks making use of the SBI network. Krishna Kumar also said the bank would add up to 1,000 branches this year. The bank will also focus on scaling up its network of point- of-sales machines.
