SBI's SME City Credit Centre Opened
Chief General Manager of State Bank of India J. Chandrasekaran (third right) and Anoop K. Prabhakar, its General Manager (second right), at the inauguration of the renovated premises of the bank’s SME City Credit Centre in Coimbatore on Friday. State Bank of India (SBI) plans to open about 15 rural Centralised Processing Centres (CPC) in the State this year. Its chief general manager (Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry) J. Chandrasekaran told presspersons here on Friday that the rural centres would be slightly different from the Small and Medium Enterprises city credit centres, to suit the demands of the rural and semi-urban areas.
The bank embarked on a business and re-engineering process three years ago and now its branches were mainly sales and service points. For credits up to Rs. 1 crore for SME clients, the branch manager collected the application and after minimum documentation forwarded it to the centre. The capacity to process the applications had been created at the centres. All the branches were covered under core banking system, and the customer could still continue to monitor from the respective branch. With this effort, the turnaround time for processing applications had been brought down to eight to 10 days from the earlier one to one-and-a-half months.
The SME city credit centres were present in almost all the major cities in the country and in seven locations in the State. In Coimbatore, 28 branches were linked to the centre and sanctioned loans to the tune of Rs. 118.88 crore in 2007-08. The small and medium-scale enterprises needed easy availability of funds now. The entire sector was undergoing structural change.
The units were either thriving in clusters or as ancillaries to larger units. So, the units were part of a value-chain. With the city credit centres, the units would get a clear picture of the application and a quick response. This helped the bank increase its business volume too, he said. Mr. Chandrasekaran and the general manager of the bank, Anoop K. Prabhakar, inaugurated the renovated premises of the centre here on Friday.
