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Public sector lender State Bank of India will tie up with a domestic firm to roll out its mobile banking services within a month, a senior bank official said.  He added that the technology platform is ready for the launch of the mobile banking service. and they have finalised a domestic firm as their partner to roll out the product. SBI has finalised a technology partner to take the services to its nearly one crore customers pan-India, he said.

The bank will join a handful of banking majors, including Standard Chartered Bank, Barclays, Union Bank and Yes Bank, who are already active in this space. Initially, the bank plans to offer basic banking services to its customers. These would include money transfer, account status enquiry and cheque book order, while other services such as bill payments and buying movie and travel tickets would be introduced later, he said. “Transaction costs of our customers will come down. Besides, it will also enable them to perform their transactions faster,” the official said.

SBI’s entry into mobile banking is also expected to give a fillip to the government’s ongoing efforts to achieve financial inclusion, given the large customer base of the bank and its extensive reach in rural areas. State Bank, the country’s largest lender, presently, has over 10,000 branches across the country. It opened 954 branches last fiscal (FY 08) and plans to add an additional 2,000 branches this fiscal, which when completed, would take its branch network in the country to around 12,000, the official said.

City-based industrial shipping and engineering firm Sanmar Group announced that it has acquired the US-based Matrix Metal LLC, a manufacturing, sourcing and distribution metal casting company, for an undisclosed sum on 1st April,2008. The deal is said to be the culmination of the Rs.15.96 billion ($398 million) turnover Sanmar’s business relationship with one of Matrix Metal’s units that sourced casting from the Indian firm.

Matrix Metals operates one of the largest speciality steel casting businesses in North America. It is a portfolio company of Jefferies Capitol Partners, a private equity investment firm with more than $680 million in funds under management. The deal is expected to result in the creation of a leading specialty steel casting group in the global arena. Matrix Metals has foundries in Keokuk (Iowa), Richmond (Texas) and San Juan del Rio in Mexico. The three plants together reportedly have a combined capacity of 30,000 tonne a year. Matrix designs and pours castings of all sizes up to 8,500 pounds.

It is focussed on meeting the casting needs in the flow control, locomotive, mining, farm equipment, heavy construction and oilfield equipment sectors. It employs around 1,300 people across these three locations. According to a release from the Sanmar Group, Matrix Metals closed the last financial year with sales of $ 157 million, up 10 per cent over 2006.

Roger Courtney, CEO of Matrix and President of Keokuk factory, said, “Combining Sanmar’s expanding foundry capacity with ours will enable us to meet almost any North American customer’s casting requirements and create new business opportunities across the combined companies”.

Matrix and the Sanmar Group have a very close relationship. NEPCO unit of Matrix has been sourcing castings from the Sanmar Group for several years now for many of its clients. The overseas acquisition comes at a time when the Sanmar Group is the midst of a capital expenditure programme in India. Currently, the Chennai Group is investing over $26 million to further expand the capacity of the steel foundry in India from 10,000 tonnes to 30,000 tonnes a year by adding three automated lines for sand castings.

According to Sanmar officials, the purchase transaction is funded with bridge loan from Bank of India and State Bank of India. The $157 million turnover Matrix Metals has over 1,300 employees and operates one of the largest casting units in North America. Sanmar’s corporate director B. Natraj, based in the US, would look after Matrix Metals.

Indian banking titan State Bank of India (SBI) hopes to do business of the order of $250 million in Sri Lanka in the coming three years. The bank already has a balance sheet size of $150 million. And it has only four branches - three in Colombo city and one in the hill town of Kandy - a company source said. Over the last three years, there has been a 50 percent growth, and the profit is of the order of $3.80 million.Worldwide, in 2006-07, SBI had assets totalling $130.33 billion, total deposits of $100.19 billion and a net profit of $1.04 billion.

In its Sri Lankan operations, the Net Non-Performing Assets (NPA), in both the Domestic Banking Unit (DBU) and the Foreign Currency Banking (FCBU), have always been less than two percent. The SBI began its operations in Sri Lanka way back in 1864, and is the island’s oldest bank. In its previous avatar as the Imperial Bank of India, it funded the operations of the Ceylon government, and the then-nascent tea industry. Today, as SBI, it is aggressively into financing the working capital needs of the Sri Lankan corporate sector, even as it has strengthened its traditional hold on the financing of exports and imports, especially Sri Lanka-India trade. Colombo is currently hosting a two-day conference of SBI branches in the south Asian region.

Industry Chamber Assocham said the workload on bank employees has nearly halved in the last few years due to installation of ATM facilities in various areas. According to an estimate of the industry chamber, workload on over 65,000 cashiers has fallen by 50 per cent in the last five years due to growing installations of offsite and onsite ATM facilities in urban, semi-urban and rural bank branches.

According to RBI data, there are a total of 88 banks, of which 27 fall in the public sector, 28 are old private sector banks and nine are new private sector banks. There are 19,547 banks branches located in rural India and 12,238 bank branches located in semi-urban India. The number of urban bank branches are 10,126. State Bank of India with its seven SBIs associates has the largest number of banking branches in India, numbering 13,661 and the largest ATMs centre of about 6000. Totally there are about 17,000 ATMs, while branches across the country are over 50,000.

Latest decision of RBI says that it would issue a directive to entire banking community and reduce transaction cost for every single withdrawal, this will make ATM operations more popular for bank customers and reducing the workload of cashiers. With the installation of ATMs, the existing cashiers in the banking sector are now confined to large and bulk cash withdrawals, making their entries and submitting the transactions tally to the respective managers. With increase in number of ATMs, clients prefer to walk across the ATM facility, make cash withdrawals and know their latest banking transaction statements.

Venugopal Dhoot, Assocham President said that the installation has created employment engagements for thousands of semi-skilled people above the age of 52-55 years, to guard at ATM locations, most of whom are superannuated from armed and paramilitary forces and other disciplines.