SBI Initiates “SBI @ Your Door Step”

The State Bank of India has taken a decision to provide point of sale machines to the retail businessmen free of cost immediately. On Thursday, the bank launched a road show, "SBI @ Your Door Step", in Vellore in order to aid merchants sail through the shortage of currency notes.

For the coming two days, the SBI van will reach out to different customers in various parts of the district. As per the information provided by Bank officials, the vehicle would directly approach the shops. The campaign is going to cover Gudiyatham and Arakkonam. In Vellore, it would approach shops and the merchants and they can place requests for point of sale machines (swiping machines). Then they are going to supply the machines immediately free of charge. This way the merchants could permit customers make purchases without carrying cash.

It will make the situation easier when cash is in demand. Once the shopkeeper files a request for the machines, their contact details and email ID would be obtained. The machines would be handed immediately.

The bank would look after the needs of merchants through this campaign. Furthermore the merchants could inform the banks if they require Mudra loans through this campaign facility.

The regional manager of SBI, A.K. Sarathy, flagged off the campaign vehicle. P.K. Babu, chief manager, SBI Vellore main branch, was present.Also, SBI has appealed to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in order to seek further relaxation of the scheme for sustainable structuring of stressed assets (S4A).

Under S4A, the banks are permitted to split the debt of a stressed company into sustainable and unsustainable halves. When the firm will continue to serve the sustainable half of the debt, the unsustainable half can be transferred into long-term equity or equity-like instruments which are held in their investment book.

On 10th November, the banking regulator had eased certain S4A rules and norms of some other bad loan management tools which includes strategic debt restructuring (SDR) and 5/25 long-term refinancing. RBI added that it would permit banks to distinguish sustainable half of the stressed debt as standard, even if the case is a non-performing asset (NPA) before invoking the S4A provision. The central bank also allowed banks to write back all the provisions made against the case, if the sustainable part of the debt showed satisfactory performance for a year.

As per the information provided by the SBI official, they’ve already performed forensic audits and evaluation studies on cases which they feel would deserve S4A treatment. Once RBI permits to alter the terms of the loan, they can move forward with these cases. As the trading session commenced on 18th Nov, SBI share priceis quoting at Rs. 279.20, up by 0.63%.Dynamic Levels have identified SBI as one of the top 500 performing stocks for this quarter owing to its strong fundamentals.