In the year 2004, one of my friend was working for a marquee software house and was posted in the picturesque Lakshwadeep. He was working with a large national bank of India, implementing the software solutions recently bought by the bank at branch levels. Boy did we envy him for his paid holiday! As we all partied hard in Bangalore on X-mas eve, the poor soul cursed us wide and between (no party place on the island he was in) and went to sleep early, with a bottle of Old Monk as his companion. As we kept on sleeping the next morning, the boy was woken up by a strange feeling of being wet all over (don’t imagine too much). The great Indian Ocean tsunami had just hit with its full might on the shores of eastern India, with the residue crossing over to the western shores albeit a much tamer form of herself. Clutching onto the desktop and running upstairs (the bank itself was his homestay during the duration of the project) he tried to salvage as much equipment as possible. Shortly the branch manager arrived to help him, followed by the residents of the lower regions. Slowly the bank turned into the makeshift shelter home for close to 20-30 odd people (might even be the full population) as being one of the better built places people were literally banking upon it for their survival.
Why am I reminded of this after 14 years?
I had to visit a branch of one of the bigger PSU banks off late, and it was a sight to behold. The employees were housed behind a wall of transparent plastic sheet, only 5 people were allowed at any point of time inside the branch. People were looking weary of even picking up the paper forms. The air smelt more like hospital with frequent sprays of sanitizers. No sharing of pens, no helping out the confused senior citizen uncle, no interaction with any fellow being around. This was a scene out of some dystopian movies.
In the middle of this scene I was left impressed by the tenacity of the employees of the bank (it was an all women branch btw),deftly handling queries as small as how to update the passbook, making bank drafts to KYC updates (for which we had to make the personal visit, which I still believe can be an entirely online process). The ~400 sq ft room with minimal ventilation is definitely not a place someone in our coterie would sign up for to work 9-5 in today’s environment. Yet there are people serving basic needs of the population en large who are either on the other side of the digital divide or not as fortunate like us to afford WFH neo normals.
I know… bank branches are for history buffs, right?
Why do we really need a bank branch in today’s networked world (to do a swift scam…no puns!). Jokes apart, I have been told how branch managers are made to sit in loan meetings on complex infrastructure project lendings, requiring highly specialized technical knowledge. They are suppose to understand the project intricacies (which industry veterans have learned over decades) and take calls on thousands of crores of lending decisions. And when these loans go bad there is no accountability..as the person who approved the project has moved on after 3 years. Makes sense, and maybe there is a need to look at how private lenders are handling it for the best practices, but when it comes to financial inclusion of the under served or equal opportunity employment (PSU Indian banks are pioneer on this front), there is no alternative to the branch banking model. The unit economics might not make sense but the social benefit (and thus the possible dividends down a generation) are immense.
But why am I thinking of those women behind the plastic veil on a cold Sunday night?
Don’t go by the cover, am not turning my back to my fav fish chickens and mutton any time soon, avian flu is just a seasonal discount nickname. I picked this book up during a short flight back home in Dec but there was something in it which made sense to me. This book lays a lot of emphasis on one word – gratitude. It makes case that its not happy people who are grateful but grateful people who are happy. Counting our blessings is an arithmetic exercise which we tend to avoid, for the immediate pleasure of cursing our neighbours (its like AM Radio vs Netflix). If there’s one resolution in 2021 that I would like to keep (am not a fan of resolutions though, they simply tend to roll over into perpetuity taking derivative forms!), is to be more grateful – for everything and something. This is to those brave women sitting in that branch day in and out and doing their duty.
One More Week 