Union Bank of India upgrading technology systems to handle demand-surge post COVID-19

The Union Bank of India, now the fifth largest bank in India in terms of total business, post the merger with Andhra and Corporation Bank, is working on technology based systems to cope up with the surge in demand once the post covid business normalisation phase sets-in. The immediate priority is to have high availability for the digital channels, for customers to avail core banking services, from their home.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19, as soon as the lockdown was announced, the Union Bank of India activated both the disaster recovery (DR) sites – one in Mumbai and the other in a remote city. “We moved some important people at the DR sites, because if the main building is blocked due to unavoidable reasons, the technology and other operations should run without any interruption,” says Rajkiran Rai G, MD & CEO of Union Bank of India. However, it was business as usual at the main building without any disruption.

Cyber Security operations centre acts as a shield for seamless operations. The training centre near the main building of the bank was converted into a temporary occupancy centre for over fourty important officials of the cybersecurity and technology operations team. They were given all the necessary facilities. It acted as a temporary nerve centre for operating the technology operations for supporting the core banking services to the customers.

A separate IT infrastructure was established for the treasury operations management, at a separate location in Mumbai. The General Managers were given access to it. “Luckily, the opportunity never occurred for the GMs to use it, but it acted as a standby to overcome business exigencies from COVID-19,” informs Rai.

Rai has charted out a short and medium term plan for the bank. In the short term, the objective is towards keeping up with the customer service as usual. “The safety of the customer, employees remains paramount. Seamless services for the customers on all the digital channels will be the priority,” says Rai. The bank is determined on keeping near to hundred percent uptime of the ATMs; strengthening the business correspondent channels at the village level. They have been given incentives for doing transactions, in order to avoid any liquidity crunch in the villages. This also relieves the load off the bank branches.

In the medium term, there are specific technology platforms, which are being created to enhance the robustness of the business processes. “These enhancements got affected because of the COVID-19, because the vendors couldn’t attend and work at the bank location. The bank is working on certain upgrades in the loan disbursal system. We are working on technologies that will help us cope up with the huge demand that will come up from retail and MSMEs, post the lockdown is over,” Rai concludes.           

The bank has a dedicated set of thirty branches for the corporate customers and there hasn’t been any kind  of delays for the customers until now. The proposals are being processed as in a business as usual scenario.

As the bank initiates the amalgamation, it also plans to upgrade the analytics centre of excellence and launch many digital banking products.