State Bank of India (SBI) is planning to open 600 branches across the country in the current financial year in a bid to tap business opportunities in emerging areas including large residential townships.

"We have strong branch expansion plans…this would be mainly focused on emerging areas. A lot of residential colonies are not covered by us. Around 600 branches is something we are planning in the current year," SBI Chairman C S Setty told PTI in an interview.

The country's biggest lender opened 137 branches last fiscal. Of the total, 59 new rural branches were inaugurated.

SBI has a network of 22,542 branches across the country as of March 2024.

Apart from branch presence, SBI has 65,000 ATMs and 85,000 business correspondents.

"We serve about 50 crore customers and we take pride in saying that we are the banker to every Indian, and, more importantly, to every Indian family," he said.

He also said it would be his endeavour to transform SBI into the best bank, the most valued bank not only from a shareholder point of view but from the point of view of every stakeholder who deals with SBI.

"It could be my customers, it could be our shareholders, it could be the larger ecosystem — the society, the institutional framework — all the stakeholders should be saying that this is the best bank to deal with," he added.

In a bid to attract depositors, State Bank of India is contemplating to come out with innovative products including a combo product of recurring deposit and SIP.

With the economy progressing, he said, customers are becoming financially more aware and demanding, and have started looking for innovative investment instruments.

"Obviously, nobody wants to put everything in a risky asset or a speculative asset…banking products will always be part of the basket. So, we are trying to bring products which will appeal to them," he said.

"We are trying to bring innovation in some of the conventional products like recurring deposit, which is actually a conventional SIP…Maybe, we can combine both fixed deposit/recurring deposit and SIP, a combo product that could be digitally accessible," he said.

Besides, he said, the bank has undertaken a massive outreach programme for the deposit mobilisation.

"As I said, for us, deposit mobilisation is a franchisee job. We have the largest number of physical outlets across the country. We are leveraging our huge physical reach by initiating outreach programmes where customers are contacted. Today, the effort on part of SBI is to reach out to every customer both existing as well as new customers," he said.

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