Ethical banking prioritizes social and environmental impacts alongside profit, fostering transparency and accountability. It avoids investments in industries like fossil fuels and promotes projects benefiting society, such as renewable energy. This trend is growing in India, reflecting a shift toward sustainable financial practices. Ethical banking aims for long-term profitability by aligning with societal values.
In today's digital age, our lives are intricately woven into the digital fabric, with memories and essential information stored on devices. World Backup Day, observed annually on March 31st, serves as a reminder to protect our digital assets. Data loss can be devastating, so implementing a robust backup strategy is crucial. Evaluation of current backup methods and automation of regular backups are key steps. By embracing proactive backup practices, individuals and organizations can empower themselves with digital resilience, ensuring the safety and accessibility of their digital lives.
Digital attacker banks have demonstrated that they can delight customers, scale up quickly and expand into new products, geographies and customer segments. Digital attackers are lower cost, faster to innovate and can transform their traditional parents. As an alternative to embarking on a multiyear, hugely expensive systems transformation, some incumbent banks have launched attackers with the aim of transforming the core business.
Frank Knight, an economist, formalised a distinction between risk and uncertainty in his 1921 book, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. In his classic book, Knight introduced a distinction between measurable uncertainty, which he called “risk,” and “true uncertainty,” which cannot “by any method be reduced to an objective, quantitatively determined probability.”
Digitalization and digitization, while often used interchangeably, refer to different concepts: the former represents the use of digital technologies to change a business, while the latter designates the transition from analog to digital forms. The banking sector exemplifies a field facing a shift towards pervasive digitalization, facilitating branchless banking and providing enhanced customer services. However, challenges such as regulatory restrictions and digital skill gaps persist. This digital transformation in banking is seen both as a challenge and an opportunity for future growth.
Public sector bank employees in India went on strike, impacting the services of approximately 80,000 bank branches. The strike was in response to potential consolidation of public sector banks through mergers. This follows a previous merger in 1993, when the New Bank of India merged with Punjab National Bank. Further consolidation has been announced in recent budgets, with the goal of reducing the number of public sector banks from 27 to between eight and ten. Nonetheless, concerns regarding the levels of non-performing assets at these banks have led some to question the timing of these consolidations.
Indrajit Roy Choudhury 