The country’s largest lender, State Bank of India (SBI) has written to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), requesting change in rules, and consider non-financial transactions like balance checking as well for tagging an account as operative. 

CS Setty, chairman of the country’s largest lender, said, many a time, an account holder, especially for accounts where cash transfers under government programmes is the primary usage, does limited number of financial transactions. Even a non-financial transaction should be able to activate the account, Setty said. “We have taken it up with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI),” he added.

After direct benefit transfer, the money gets credited into the account, there are at best two-three debit transactions before it becomes dormant and earns the tag of being inoperative, he said on the sidelines of a bank event late on Tuesday evening.

He added that the current set of rules focus on financial transactions in a given point of time which result in a lot of accounts getting tagged as “inoperative”.

When a customer actually does a non-financial transaction, it is a signal of he or she being “aware” of the bank account and hence there is a case for tagging it as an active account, he said.

SBI has launched a nation-wide drive to raise awareness about the importance of Inoperative account activation. A savings or a current account is treated as inoperative if the customer has no transaction in the account for a period of over two years. Activation of these accounts requires Re-KYC. Necessity of regular transactions in the account and preventing categorization into in-operative was the key message.

With PTI Inputs