State bank of India has changed names and Indian Financial System Code (IFSC) codes of nearly its 1,300 branches. The move came after the country’s biggest lender has merged five of its branches into itself.
The branches whose names have been changed are located in major cities such as Mumbai, New Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Lucknow, among others. SBI that has close to 23,000 branches has put up the list of branches with old and new names and IFSC codes on its website.
SBI’s managing director (retail and digital banking), Praveen Gupta said, “Some of our old associate branches are getting merged with SBI branches. When that merger happens, the IFSC codes get changed”.
Customers have been informed about the change in IFSC codes, but internally also the bank has mapped them to the new codes.
But what exactly has happened, will it has an impact on your payment services via cheque? Let us tell you in details:
To elaborate SBI’s move further, first let us understand what is an IFSC code? The IFSC is an 11-digit alpha-numeric code is used to identify all bank branches participating in any Reserve Bank of India regulated funds transfer system.
The IFSC code is required to transfer money from one account to another using RTGS, NEFT or IMPS methods.
What has happened and why? As mentioned above, SBI has changed the names and IFSC codes of its 1,300 branches. At present, SBI has close to 23,000 branches. SBI has decided to revised the names and codes on back of its decisionin April, where it merged its five associate banks – State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, State Bank of Patiala, State Bank of Travancore, State Bank of Hyderabad, State Bank of Mysore – and also Bhartiya Mahila Bank into itself.
How will it affect to the customers? SBI’s managing director has assured the customers that after the revision of names and IFSC codes, if a payment comes based on the old IFSC codes, it will get mapped with the new codes and won’t cause any problem to any customer.
How to check if your SBI branch code has been changed? SBI has put up the list of branches with old and new names and IFSC codes on its website. A customer can find out your bank IFSC code and other details you can go to the SBI Branch Locator web page.
Meanwhile, State Bank of India said that it will “redesign” its envelopes used to dispatch tax refund cheques of customers to cover their PAN and contact numbers, after an activist raised that the crucial personal information was visible to anyone which may result in misuse.
The move comes nearly 16 months after activist Commodore (retd) Lokesh Batra raised the issue that the window envelopes used by SBI make it easy for someone to glance through permanent account number (PAN) and contact number of the tax payee and misuse it.
Batra wrote to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Urjit Patel, alleging that SBI was violating its directions on ‘protection of customer’s information’ by sending crucial information about customers in “unsecured envelopes”.
“…this systemic failures by banks must be breaching the personal information of very large numbers of People. I had reported this matter at the highest level in SBI…, but as of now no one has even blinked…and breaching of people’s personal information is continuing,” he wrote to the RBI Governor on November 28.
He said he had been “pleading” with SBI at the highest level for the past 16 months to ensure compliance with RBI directions, but nothing has changed.
After the RBI referred the matter to SBI, the bank responded by saying that “the envelops (window envelops) in which income tax refund orders are being dispatched to various assesses will be redesigned, so that the PAN number is not visible to anyone”.
DNA
