UPSC Articles
Public Sector Bank Reforms Agenda – EASE 4.0
Part of: Prelims and GS – III – Banking sector
In news: Union Finance Minister has unveiled a set of reforms for public sector banks (PSBs) called EASE 4.0 (Enhanced Access and Service Excellence).
- These reforms have been rolled out by the government to further the agenda of customer-centric digital transformation and embed digital and data into PSBs’ way of working’.
- EASE 4.0 commits PSBs to tech-enabled, simplified and collaborative banking.
What reforms fall under EASE 4.0?
The EASE 4.0 reforms looks at four key initiatives for public sector banks to adopt:
- Smart lending backed by analytics;
- Dial-a-loan for doorstep lending
- Credit@Click: End to End digital retail and MSME lending for
- Analytics based credit offers
- 24×7 banking with resilient technology and cloud based IT systems
- Deeper penetration of Mobile & internet banking
- Cloud-based IT Systems and improved cyber resilience
- Process automation
- Data enabled agriculture financing;
- Dial-a-loan for agri loans
- Partnership with AgriTechs for data exchange
- Automated Processing & sanctioning
- Collaborating with the financial ecosystem.
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- Digital Payments in semi-urban and rural areas
- At scale delivery of doorstep banking services
- Co-lending with NBFCs
The annual report for the PSB Reforms Agenda EASE 3.0 for 2020-21 was also released.
- The overall score of PSBs increased by 35% between March-2020 and March-2021,
- The average EASE index score improved from 44.2 to 59.7 out of 100.
- The highest improvement is seen in the themes of ‘Smart Lending’ and ‘Institutionalising Prudent Banking’.
- Credit@click was a flagship initiative under EASE 3.0: Nearly 4.4 lakh customers have been benefited through such instantaneous and simplified credit access
- Nearly 72% of financial transactions are now happening through digital channels.
- PSBs are now offering services across call centres, Internet banking, and Mobile banking in 14 regional languages such as Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, etc.
- For continual improvement in coverage under financial inclusion initiatives, there was a 13% growth in transactions provided by Bank Mitras in rural areas and 50% growth in enrolments in Micro personal accident insurance in Q4FY21 compared to Q4FY20.
