Our role in times of adversity:

RESPONSIBLE

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged governments, industries, and businesses across the world. The sudden emergence of this health crisis has tested the strength of even the most evolved economies. This has compelled all of us to re-think and re-strategize our approach in this challenging environment.

In State Bank of India, we understand that the pandemic has affected the economy, industry and businesses at different levels besides testing human endurance most significantly. We have responded to this crisis by implementing various measures to ensure the safety and well-being of our employees and customers. Our strategies involved ensuring the protection of our human capital while focusing on providing uninterrupted service to our customers across India and abroad. Today, the role we play in society has become even more crucial. To this end, we enhanced our social initiatives to help our communities deal with the contagion.

Customers

Being the Banker to Every Indian household, it was of paramount importance to take care of the safety of our customers without compromising on service quality. During the pandemic, our wide network of 22,219 branches and 62,617 ATMs were kept functional to cater to our customers’ needs. As a safety measure, we carried out regular sanitisation of our branch premises to contain the spread of the virus. In addition to this, we also embraced digital readiness to meet our customers online and organised 816 e-townhall meetings for our Micro, Small, and Medium enterprises (MSME) clientele. All our employees rose to the challenge of keeping banking operations functional during this critical period and serving our customers uninterruptedly. We are extremely proud of the collective efforts of our employees in these trying times.

Employees

While we accorded high priority to providing uninterrupted services to our customers, we also took several measures to ensure that our employees work in a safe and protected environment. To this end, we undertook various initiatives for employee benefit such as reimbursement of expenses incurred on COVID-19 tests and treatment, special support to all the Covid-affected employees, and sanction of Special Leaves to employees on quarantine to contain the spread of the virus. These measures helped in keeping the employees motivated and equipped to handle the crisis. The WFH arrangement provides flexibility to our employees to continue working from home thereby eliminating the risk of contracting infection during travel by public transport.