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.
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.
