Speaking at BancIT'99 in Bangalore on Friday, he said the domestic banking sector should make use of the advanced information technology available in the country to cut down operational costs, on par with other Asian countries.

He said no country could afford to take any longer to adopt new technology and it was time for India to build up IT architecture and infrastructure to face the future challenges.

He said in the future, Indian banking should concentrate on retail segments, building up strong distribution channels, strengthening the areas of credit and risk management and improve productivity by adopting technology.

Sketching out the future of banking globally, Cheong said information technology would play a vital role over three years. He predicted that thetransformation would see new service providers emerge with networking solutions along with a thin client culture.

"Network and consumer service will proliferate and be more pervasive than PCs, Internet will be the dominant infrastructure for universal access and service delivery and the webtone will be as realiable as dialtone," Cheong said.

He said applications would be written to the net and not on devices, while access through portals would make consumers feel "at home, anywhere." "Everything will be mission-oriented and extranets and intranets will converge," he said.

Later, listing some of the impediments facing the banking sector, Bank of India chairman and managing director S Rajagopal said though most of the technologies that could be considered suitable for India had been introduced, the expected amount of success had not been achieved. He said the country was still lacking in automation and commercially-oriented inter-bank platform.