Mumbai: ICICI Bank Ltd, India’s largest private sector lender, on Thursday launched its robotic software which will take care of multiple backend transactions at the bank. The bank has already transferred about 200 of its business processes under the robotic software, which will manage 1 million transactions per day, said Chanda Kochhar, managing director and chief executive officer, ICICI Bank. Under this campaign, software robots will take over high repitition, high volume activities of the backend and remove human interference. The business processes will cover multiple departments of the bank, including retail banking operations, agricultural banking, trade and foreign exchange, treasury and human resources management among others. The bank is planning to more than double the software robots to over 500 by the end of this financial year. Processes such as PAN and Aadhaar details validation, airway bill updation from courier sites, duplicate statement generation, interbank foreign currency settlement and debit card reissuance have all moved to software robotics. Also Read: ICICI Bank eyes 30 lakh transactions via e-toll plazas by MarchW hen asked about whether the use of robotic software will help to decrease the cost-to-income ratio, Kochhar said that technology will help the bank in improving productivity and bringing more efficiency, but did not quantify the benefit to the bank. As on 30 June, the bank had a cost to income ratio of 34.7%. “The bank will be able to maintain its cost-to-income ratio around current levels, even with an expansion plan involving more ATMs (automated teller machines) and branches this year," said N.S. Kannan, executive director at the bank, speaking about the benefits of robotics. Last month, The Times of India reported that HDFC Bank will deploy humanoid robots that would greet customers at some its branches. “On global scale UBS, Goldman Sachs have also used software robotics. Currently 10% of internal processing transactions are covered through this technology and by the end of this year, 20% of our internal transactions will go through this process," said Kochhar.
ICICI Bank will "remove human interference" from multiple back-end tasks and replace them with robotic software. The bank has been working on the project for a few years now, but it is now ready to start testing its new system in India.