Grocery shop-owners, vegetable vendors, owners of small restaurants, neighbourhood paanwallas, among others, can walk into this bank's lobby, deposit their day's cash earnings into a machine and get immediate credit for the amount deposited. Recently, the Greater Bombay Co-operative Bank opened an e-lobby with seven electronic machines, including one for cash deposits, at its Khargar branch, on the fringes of Mumbai, to facilitate 24x7 banking. A customer can walk into the lobby of the branch at his own convenience, even after the bank's business hours, for conducting any of the seven routine transactions — deposit cash; withdraw cash; deposit cheque; update passbook; print account statement; make utility bill payments and get coins. There's a machine installed to handle each of these functions at the branch. As transactions of Rs 50,000 and above require PAN number and supervision of the bank's staff, the bank has restricted cash deposits to up to Rs 49,000 in any denomination at the cash deposit machine. The machine is equipped to reject counterfeit and soiled notes.
‘Do-it-yourself' strategy
The bank gives a common personal identification number (PIN) to customers to access the seven machines. “The bank hit upon the ‘do-it-yourself' automated banking strategy as 80 per cent of the customer transactions are routine in nature. We have suggested to our vendors to compress all the seven identified routine transactions into a single machine so that the lobby space can be utilised optimally,” said Mr B. V. R. Sarma, Chief Executive Officer, Greater Bank. The seven machines, which are linked to the core banking platform of the bank, are installed in a 150 sq.ft area in the lobby of the branch. The total cost of these machines works out to around Rs 15 lakh. Plans are afoot to carve out up to 150 sq.ft of lobby space in each of the bank's 20-odd branches in the city to install machines that will enable automated banking, said Mr Narendrakumar Baldota, Chairman, Greater Bank.
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