Will Take A Month To Get All ATMs Up And Running, SBI Warns
SBI urges consumers to use credit/debit cards where ever possible.
The country’s largest public sector lender, State Bank of India (SBI) has urged customers to use their debit or credit cards for as many transactions as possible. The bank’s chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya who was speaking to reporters after bank branches reopened on Thursday, said all banks were working overtime to ensure that customers could deposit old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes in exchange for Rs 100 and the newly printed Rs 2,000 currency notes from bank branches. This comes after the government declared all existing Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes as not binding legal tender from the midnight of November 9, 2016.
While lauding the government’s move to demonetise all existing Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes, she admitted there will be some teething problems as automatic teller machines (ATM) will have to be reconfigured to dispense only Rs 100 currency notes for the time being, which may take up to four weeks to fix. ATMs remained shut on Thursday and some are expected to start dispensing cash from Friday.
All bank branches were also closed to the public on Wednesday, and citizens thronged to bank branches on Thursday, when they reopened, looking to exchange their old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes with Rs 100 and new Rs 2,000 currency notes.
Bhattacharya said SBI alone, had replaced currency notes worth Rs 12 lakh by 3:30 pm on Thursday, and the total debit and credit card transactions had crossed Rs 1.5 crore.
The Reserve Bank of India has placed a daily withdrawal limit of Rs 4,000 for any one exchanging old currency notes in the branch, while only withdrawals from the bank account have been capped at Rs 10,000 per day. Bhattacharya said, these caps will go a long way in ensuring that there is enough cash in the branches to help people who have no alternate payment options like debit or credit cards.
I request everyone who has plastic money to use it for buying grocery and petrol etc. It will help those who don’t have debit cards so that they can go and get their notes exchanged. Others can come in at any time of their convenience to the branches. There’s no need to rush.Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairman, SBI
ATMs usually have four cassettes in them which hold currency notes of different denominations. There are some machines in the country which don’t have the configuration to hold Rs 100 notes, she pointed out.
Bhattacharya said that it takes about three people on the spot to configure an ATM machine by changing cassettes which is a time-consuming process so all ATMs won’t immediately have a full supply of cash. “It’s a time consuming process so we can’t expect it to happen in the next few days. We will need at least 10-15 days to finish the process,” she said while adding that there are only a few vendors who can configure the ATMs which is likely to add to the challenge.
Bhattacharya clarified that photocopies of identity proof aren’t necessary for people to exchange their money at bank branches but conceded that some bank branches including those of SBI were being extra cautious and insisting on it.
It’s just the first day. There are only 3-4 cash management vendors and that’s a challenge but it won’t hopefully take more than a month. There are cassettes in the ATMs and some of our ATMs are not even equipped to handle Rs 100 notes yet but there are many ATMs which were recently configured to exclusively dispense Rs 100 notes so there shouldn’t be a lot of problems.Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairman, SBI