State Bank of India (SBI) will hire over 10,000 engineers, which would around 85% of the new recruits in FY25, said chairman Dinesh Khara on Thursday.
“Around 11,000 to 12,000 employees are in the hiring process. These are general employees, but we actually are having a system where at our associate level and officers’ level around 85% are engineers. We give them some exposure to understand banking and thereafter we start channelising them into various associate roles and some of them will be channelised in IT,” said Khara.
Khara also added that the bank is also specifically looking at hiring new employees for technology skills.
A majority of the new employees will join as business associates, and around 2,006 candidates will be designated as probationary officers, the bank’s management said, adding that the bank is also open to hiring specialist candidates for developing its information technology (IT) infrastructure. SBI’s total employee base stood at 2.32 lakh in FY24, down from 2.35 lakh as on March, 2023.
At the same time, the bank has big plans for its upgraded version of the Yono application. Khara said the bank will launch the first phase of Yono 2.0 application by July, which will be more modular and have hyper personalisation features. Currently, it has over 60.7 million users on the Yono mobile application.
“Yono 2.0 has significant investment, and upgradation in terms of product profile. It involves lot of investment in terms of time and money but we are carrying it out and we will roll out first phase in July,” Khara said.
The bank also made a total provision of Rs 15,877.09 crore towards meeting the 17% wage hike provision as part of the twelfth bipartite settlement agreed by the Indian Banks’ Association and bank unions during FY24.
The lender will also add 300 new branches in FY25, more than double than the 140 new branches added in FY24.