State Bank of India is planning to deploy about 5,000 employees as marketing personnel and relationship managers across the top 50 cities in the country by 2008.
By the same time the bank also aims to change the role of its branches and network all the 14,000 branches of the SBI group.
The stress on sales and marketing functions has come as an outcome of the overhaul that the country's largest bank is going through. The business reengineering exercise, titled 'Operation Vijay', is expected to yield results by 2008.
The concept of marketing is a big cultural change for a public sector bank where the staff was used to working in the comfort of a bank branch.
"But now the attitude will slowly have to change. We need employees out on the street to sell and cross-sell all our loan products," said bank officials.
As of now SBI has just about 150 people engaged in marketing. About half of them are relationship managers for corporate, mid-corporate and high net worth clients.
"As people get trained in these functions, they will be asked to train more staff," said bank officials.
SBI, with a staff force of 200,000, says it will not need to recruit fresh people for these relatively new functionalities.
The bank also plans to change the look and feel of its branches by 2008. Only the front staff will be in the branches soon. The staff beyond the counters, who look after records, will all be part of different processing centres. This is similar to the model adopted in most the private banks in the country.
By 2008, the bank also aims to put all the 14,000 branches of the SBI group (9,000 of SBI and the remaining that of the seven associate banks) on the centralised banking system, which will interconnect them. At present, all the 14,000 branches have been computerised on a standalone basis.
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