State Bank of India group plans to acquire 50,000 Point-of-Sale (PoS) machines for deployment over the next 18 months.

These are being done as part of its plans to upgrade its technological infrastructure and improve the speed of customer handling at its branches as well as merchant locations.

SBI has over 14,100 branches while its five associate banks have over 4,500 branches. The group has about 28,000 ATMs.

Green Channel

At present, the bank and its associates have a Single Window Operator counter called Green Channel at their branches. Under this facility, it is possible to withdraw, deposit or remit amount up to Rs 40,000.

The SBI group plans to enlarge the type of transactions at these Green Channel counters through deploying these terminals.

Among other things, the transactions would include bill payment, bus/train/air ticketing, gold coin sale, mobile top-up, merchant acquiring business activity, etc.

Currently about 35 per cent of the transactions done by SBI’s 200 million customers is through alternate channels (non-branch) such as internet, mobile, ATMs, PoS terminals etc.