State Bank of India embarks on drive to ease KYC process

Mumbai, Nov 4 (PTI) State Bank of India has embarked on a drive to cut the Know Your Customer (KYC) process to a single one across its branches, a top official said on Tuesday.

The bank is targeting to complete the process by end of March 2026, chairman C S Setty said, adding that once its gets a unified KYC, it will start a department within the bank to offer "KYC as a service" to various other functions.

"We realise that there are 15 different ways the EKYC is done in SBI alone. So, we want to actually revise our own processes," Setty told reporters.

Explaining the cumbersome process followed at present, Setty said each time a customer seeks to access a newer service, like people's provident fund or a home loan, he or she is forced to do a new KYC everytime even though the bank is the same.

Setty said the effort to streamline KYC is a part of the "Saral' project that the bank had embarked on recently, and added that this part of "process reengineering" efforts.

A team of over 50 people is working on the KYC project, and it will take up to two months for them to just understand the process, after which they will build the solution, Setty said.

The KYC guidelines, under which a customer establishes his or her identity using documents such as Aadhaar, Pan Card or passport, have been among the challenges for the banking system as a whole and the RBI has also flagged difficulties around the same.

The Financial Stability Development Council (FSDC) has also taken note of the challenges, and efforts have also been mounted to have a single KYC process for accessing all the financial services governed by all the regulators. PTI AA MR