Talk of fintechs taking away banks’ business no longer there, says SBI MD Ashwini Kumar Tewari

SBI's Managing Director Ashwini Kumar Tewari on Thursday said that the notion of fintechs replacing traditional banks is no longer a concern. Instead, he emphasised that banks are actively engaging in collaborations with numerous fintech companies on a large scale.

Speaking at the PwC CEO Dialogues hosted by CNBC-TV18, Tewari acknowledged that fintechs possess greater agility and a quicker response time in meeting customer needs.

“In these three years, we have found that we are collaborating with quite a few fintechs in various aspects — for example, pooling of data of GST, the PAN data, etc, which they are able to do in a very seamless manner. The players have already become embedded in our system. So, therefore, we no longer talk about them as fintechs or something; they are like partners to us, which should have been the original idea and collaboration I see happening on a very large scale,” he said.

“And clearly they are much more nimble, their UI, UX is much superior, they are able to respond to requirements of the customer in a much faster manner,” he said.

To facilitate these collaborations, SBI is sharing its core Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) with fintechs as soon as they come onboard.

“So I now see us developing an API library where we are able to share our core API's with fintechs as soon as we onboard them. Onboarding process, of course has to be a little bit detailed and much more, so that we take care of the cyber risks, we take care of the scalability, we take care of the fact that the fintechs may have smaller teams and we do not want a situation where suddenly some fintech drops out and we don't know who will service that app or the application which was provided. So subject to these kinds of things, I am seeing a lot of collaboration happening,” he said.

Tewari said he was optimistic about these partnerships with fintechs enhancing customer value and experience.

Gayathri Parthasarathy, Lead - FS Sector, PwC India, said digital transformation is happening across the country. “It is written all over the country and all over the banking sector. And also in terms of the innovations that is coming across in payments, whether it is UPI, UPI lite, or anything else that is happening from a fintech ecosystem, etc. All are leading to in terms of how the disruptive technologies can help the banks to further strengthen and grow.”

Prashant Kumar, MD & CEO, YES Bank, said his bank has seen a huge advantage in partnering with fintechs.

“I think, only because of this collaboration, today we are almost contributing 40 percent to the UPI transaction and UPI transaction touching almost 10 billion a month and we are talking about 1 billion every day in next three years. I think they have some huge strength, which are not there in the banks. Because banks are heavily regulated entities, they have to focus on different kinds of things whereas their focus is on one problem statement. They pick up one problem statement, provide the solution. They are very innovative. And I think they are able to read the pulse of the customer much better than a bank. So I think this kind of partnership has actually helped both of them,” he said.

Sanjeev Krishan, Chairman, PwC in India, noted that the infusion of fintechs has made banks look more youthful. “I think we should celebrate it, including things like more recently CBDC. These are huge enablers for us.”

J Venkatramu, MD & CEO, India Post Payments Bank, said that the advent of fintechs has created value and changed the consumer experience.