of India for use in transit payments
for train, subway, and buses. This
will become a massive market as
the transportation system in India in a manner that was very satisfactory
modernizes. for all of our customers. We also
The pace of digital transactions in
received accolades from the
India is growing very rapidly, and as government. We were able to quickly digital payments increase, the number extract data on demonetization from Customer satisfaction would increase
of transactions also increases. We the core banking system, and many of as a result.
expect the exponential increase to the decisions which the government continue. took during that period were based approach for our Government
on that data. Banking services. Initially, these
How has SBI prepared for
this exponential increase in
transaction volume?
We have benchmarked TCS BaNCS
to handle 2 billion customer accounts
and 23,000 transactions per second.
We took the same decoupling
services were built into the
Running such a large
organization as SBI,
how do you ensure agility
with your systems?
When we started, our core banking
core banking solution. Then, we
took those functions out into
a separate application, making
them more agile and nimble.
We can make modifications in
Currently we are at about 700 system was a monolithic application, ways that we could not have
million customer accounts and 7,500 which we thought was an ideal done earlier, which has increased
transactions per second, which leaves architecture. We soon realized that our agility in creating highly
a considerable amount of headroom having a monolithic application customized banking services for
in our core banking architecture. This sharply increased our time to market. specific government agencies.
gives us confidence that TCS BaNCS A core banking system needs to will hold us in good stead for the connect with multiple interfaces and
foreseeable future. channels, and the best way of doing
We recently saw our infrastructure
so is through APIs. Otherwise, you
Any final thoughts
on the relationship
between SBI and TCS?
TCS has the advantage of its
put to the test with banknote end up with the spaghetti of one- demonetization in India. Within a to-one connectivity between every lineage as part of the Tata Group of
span of three months thereafter, system that needs to exchange data. companies, which are known to have
the number of digital transactions
For example, our SMS notification
a very good corporate governance
almost doubled, but we had plenty of engine was originally built into the culture and very high ethical
headroom. core banking system. When we standards. Because of this, we have
wanted to add different kinds of a great deal of faith in TCS as an
notifications, we found that it was organization.
What other challenges
did you face with
demonetization?
very difficult to change the code.
TCS has been running our core
This delayed our ability to provide banking solution for almost 18 years.
notifications for new services. In addition, TCS is involved in running
be changed very rapidly to account Working with TCS, we decoupled many other critical systems of the
for new restrictions and limits. The the notification engine from the core bank.
instructions would arrive in the banking system, so that notifications evening, and by the next morning, work through an API that can connect has been able to accommodate us —
our interfaces had to be ready for the with any component of core banking most of the time. No relationship in
change. The TCS teams responded or any other system. We can now the world is perfect, and we will always
admirably to the challenge. We were deploy new types of notifications have more demands on them than
able to handle the massive changes much faster in response to consumer they can fulfill. But the relationship has
during the period of demonetization needs, and it’s much more reliable. been a very satisfying one.
Our core banking system had to
17
Whenever the need has arisen, TCS
l