RBI seeks report on CBS status from banks

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) today asked commercial and cooperative banks to submit status reports on implementation of core banking solutions (CBS) in order to plan a nationwide roll out of electronics clearing service (ECS).

The central bank is designing an ECS system which will have much broader coverage than the existing one. At present, the ECS system is operational at 43 centres. The RBI is providing these services at 15 locations and other banks are operating this clearing at the remaining centres.

A nationwide ECS, for which there is a strong demand from mutual funds and capital market intermediaries, will have a centralised data submission facility to ensure safety and efficiency.

Banks should provide information about whether they are implementing CBS, how many branches are on the platform and whether they have centralised processing facilities, RBI said in a communication to bank CEOs.

The volume of ECS transactions "� both in debit clearing and credit clearing "� is growing rapidly. The growth rate of debit clearing transactions is much larger than the credit clearing and many utility companies have evinced a lot of interest in utilising the system for collection of utility bills.

There has been a pressing demand from various sections viz. capital market participants, mutual funds industry, banks, etc. to start a robust state-of-the-art nationwide ECS covering more branches and locations with Centralised data submission system, it said.