SBI plans to roll out single-window KYC for all products by March

Mumbai: State Bank of India plans to launch a centralised know-your-customer (KYC) portal by the end of FY26 to make onboarding smoother across its product lines. The move will enable customers to complete their KYC process once, allowing them access to all its products and services without the need for repeated verifications.

“We will provide KYC as a service,” chairman C.S. Setty said at the sidelines of a conference to announce the bank’s Q2FY26 results.

SBI’s move comes amid growing calls to simplify the KYC process, which, though essential to prevent fraud and update customer data, has long been seen as a compliance burden.

The requirement for re-KYC is more frequent in the case of public sector banks with large volumes of basic and Jan Dhan accounts, which often inconveniences users and risks account restrictions.

Currently, an SBI customer needs to complete the KYC process or do a re-KYC every time they take a new product.

“It is not only about SBI's KYC process, which itself is cumbersome. We realised that there are 15 different ways KYC is done in SBI alone. So, we want to actually revise, revamp our own processes and in the process, we have to have some discussion with the regulators, with the government in terms of improving the ecosystem,” he said.

The KYC revamp is part of SBI’s broader undertaking titled ‘Project Saral’ to simplify eight key and impactful areas identified by the bank.

Last month, the chairman had said at an event that the KYC process was one of the major challenges for both banks and customers and called upon policymakers, fintech and technology developers to simplify the process.

Yono 2.0 launch

Setty said the long-awaited launch of the second generation of the bank’s digital application is also nearing final stages.

“We are aiming for commercial launch during the current quarter, unless something, some issues crop up, I think we are scheduling for the current quarter,” Setty said, adding that the new app will be a lot more intuitive and backed by “completely refreshed” technology to offer an omnichannel experience to customers.

The bank has 9.3 crore mobile banking customers and 10 crore internet banking customers. While some may be using both, the idea is for them to have a common experience across platforms, Setty said.

“We currently have 9.3 crore customers, our ambition is to have at least 20 crore mobile banking customers. The platform is built right from the beginning to handle this 20 crore customer volume, which means that you need to have robust technology, high availability, apart from very intuitive customer journeys.”

Setty said the initial focus will be on migrating existing users before expanding to new registrations, a reflection of the smartphone penetration across the geography. Almost 70% of SBI's customer base uses smartphones, he said.

The bank had earlier said the refreshed app will offer services in 15 languages, more broad-based products especially for farmers and MSMEs, and also its branch and community customers.

Despite the digital push, SBI will continue expanding its physical footprint with 450–500 new branches in FY26, Setty said. The bank has around 500 million customers and around 1.6 lakh touchpoints.