Everywhere banking… Almost!

Banking is moving towards making ATMs almost like a branch where most of the basic banking transactions can be done using technology. This encourages banks to avoid opening branches in general, and particularly in rural areas where there is a huge less-literate population that is unable to use an ATM and requires someone to talk to for banking.

I am wondering, when we can use ATM of any bank irrespective of where we have our account, how about allowing customers to use the branch of any bank irrespective of the bank where one has the account? Imagine the impact of this on inclusive banking in rural areas where bank branches are far and few in between. This may provide more reasons to have a bank account for huge rural population that avoids banking and prefers cash for lack of easy access to bank branches in smaller villages.

This may also encourage banks for have more branches for opportunities to cross sell products, apart from additional revenue from potential service charges, to customers of other banks.

An Indian bank like State Bank of India can easily implement this between their 6-7 ‘group’ banks, as a step towards their eventual merger. This should be easy with most banks using a core banking system across branches. Next step could be to implement this across all nationalized banks.

Thank you for reading. Hope this makes sense. Shall highly appreciate your feedback and thoughts.


Location: Nagpur, Maharashtra, India

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