RBI wins Digital Transformation Award 2025 by UK’s Central Banking for tech innovations ‘Sarthi’, ‘Pravaah’

India's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), has been selected for the Central Banking's Digital Transformation Award 2025 in London, United Kingdom, on Friday, March 14, as per a social media post on platform X.

“The Reserve Bank of India has been selected for the Digital Transformation Award 2025 by Central Banking, London, UK,” said RBI in its post on platform X. 

According to the social media post, the Reserve Bank of India was awarded this recognition for its initiatives like the Pravaah and Sarthi systems, which have been developed in-house.

“RBI was awarded and recognised for its initiatives, including Pravaah and Sarthi systems, that have been developed by in-house developer team. The awards committee noted how these digital initiatives have reduced use of paper-based submissions thus transforming RBI’s internal and external processes,” said RBI in its post on Friday. 

What is RBI Sarthi?

RBI's Sarthi system is a digital initiative to digitise the organisation's internal workflow. The word “Sarthi” means charioteer in Hindi, and the system was taken live in January 2023, which seeks to help the employees store and share documents securely in the system.

This system aims to improves record management and increases options for data analysis through the reports and dashboards available, according to the Central Banking website cited in the social media post. 

What is RBI Pravaah?

The RBI Pravaah is another initiative which was launched in May 2024. The system was created to digitise means for external users to submit regulatory applications to the banking regulator.

Pravaah is the digital portal through which the documents submitted are processed and plugged into the Sarthi database where they can be handled digitally across the central bank's offices within a centralised system overseen by cyber security and digital tracking. 

RBI IT department's chief general manager, Shailendra Trivedi, led the team which made the two systems. Trivedi termed the Pravaah system as one of the “major initiatives of digital transformation” at the Reserve Bank of India, according to the report.

RBI's move to make these systems in-house reportedly made more efficient utilization of resources and likely reduced the time of the launch on the systems.

The Pravaah system has allowed more than 70 different regulatory applications to be digitised so far along with supporting work of nine RBI departments, as per the report.