MUMBAI: The nation’s largest lender State Bank of India is planning to compete the overhaul and modernization of its core banking system within the next two years, a senior official has said.
The modernization is being carried out by the bank and its subsidiary SBI Payments Services, said the seniormost managing director of the bank Ashwini Kumar Tewari, who handles corporate banking and subsidiaries, in Singapore on Thursday.
He said the overhaul involves transforming the bank’s legacy systems through hollowing, microservices, modernization, and externalization, while maintaining the continuity, trust, and resilience that define SBI’s operations.
Elaborating on the approach, Tewari said SBI has been working on a four-axis strategy -- upgrading its hardware, migrating from Unix to Linux, hollowing out the core by externalizing functions such as vendor and government payments, and introducing microservices for operations like inquiries and accounting. These initiatives, he explained, are helping the bank re-architect its core systems for greater agility and scale.
Underlining the technological shift, he said SBI is also building a private cloud infrastructure to ensure scalability while maintaining regulatory compliance and data security.
“We are modernizing as we sail the ship. Our systems must always remain on and available to customers,” Tewari said, addressing a fintech summit in the city-state, and highlighted the bank’s focus on uninterrupted service continuity.
Discussing SBI’s evolving partnership model with the fintech ecosystem, he said the narrative has moved from competition to collaboration. To encourage innovation, SBI has developed a sandbox and innovation hub, opening access to nearly 300 APIs that allow fintechs to test and integrate their solutions with SBI’s systems.
“Along with agility, convenience, intuitiveness, interface, security and compliance, the ability to meet the scale of SBI’s operations is a crucial parameter for fintech onboarding,” he added.
Tewari also revealed that SBI is now deploying agentic AI through a fintech partner to verify trade finance documents such as guarantees and letters of credit—helping both internal teams and customers achieve faster, more accurate processing. AI applications are also being explored in areas like service ticket resolution and document analysis to enhance operational efficiency, he added.