MANU/PIBU/3014/2021

Department/Board : Press Information Bureau

Date : 27.07.2021

Measures taken to facilitate digital banking

Nearly 72% of financial transactions of PSBs done through digital channels

Active customers doubled on digital channels from 3.4 crore in FY 2019-20 to 7.6 crore in FY 2020-21

Financial transactions undertaken through home and mobile channels increased from 29% in FY 2018-19 to 76% in FY 2020-21

The Government has taken a number of steps to facilitate digital banking, doorstep banking services and digital lending platforms. This was stated by Union Minister of State for Finance Dr. Bhagwat Kisanrao Karad in a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha today.

Giving details of the steps, the Minister stated that these include, inter-alia, the following:

1. Initiation of digital lending has been made contactless through PSB loans in 59 minutes.com, using triangulation of credit bureau, income-tax and goods and services tax (GST) data, to provide online in principle approval for MSME loans.

2. Online bill discounting for MSMES has been enabled on a competitive basis through Public Sector Banks (PSBs) onboarding onto the Trade Receivables Discounting System (TReDS) platform and the proportion of online discounted bills has grown rapidly.

3. Government's Jeevan Pramaan' initiative for pensioners has enabled senior citizen pensioners the facility to update their annual life certificate online.

4. Under the Government-initiated PSB Reforms Agenda,-

i. Enhanced access to Mobile and Internet banking has been enabled through an increase in the average number of services offered (43), customer-friendly features (135) and regional language customer-interface (8);

ii. End-to-end automated digital lending has been introduced in larger PSBs for unsecured personal loans (in five PSBs), loans to micro-enterprises ("Shishu Mudra", in five PSBs) and renewals of loans to micro, small and medium enterprises (in three PSBs);

iii. Digital retail l........