On Friday the Reserve Bank took another major step towards bringing about financial inclusion by allowing the commercial banks to open mobile branches without its approval in areas with less than 50,000 population.
In a notification issued by the central bank said, “It has been decided to further liberalize the branch authorization policy and grant general permission to domestic scheduled commercial banks (other than RRBs) to operationalise mobile branches in tier 3 to tier 6 centers (with population up to 49,999 as per Census 2001) subject to reporting."
This move of RBI will help banks to take banking services to unbanked areas and help promoting financial inclusion.
The notification said, the mobile branch scheme is likely to extend banking facilities through a well protected van having two or three officials of the bank sitting in it with books, safe containing cash etc.
The central bank said, the mobile branch will visit only marked places on the specific days and it will not visit the villages or centers where there are cooperative banks branches and are being served by regular branches of commercial banks.
The notification said the van will be stationed in each location for a reasonable time on specified days and specified hours so that people can use its services easily and properly. It also added the record of the business transactions at the mobile branch will be kept in the books of the base branch or data center.
It said, it has also been decided that general permission will be given to scheduled commercial banks (other than RRBs) to operate mobile ATMs at places identified by them and for this they don’t need to take any prior permission from the Reserve Bank.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment