BoB to Double Tech Team to 3,000 by FY26

Mumbai, Jun 23 (PTI) State-owned Bank of Baroda is aiming to double its in-house technology team headcount to 3,000 in the next two years, a top official has said.

The new additions to the current team strength of 1,500 employees will be done both through the regular hiring processes and lateral hires of specialist talent, Debadatta Chand, its managing director and chief executive officer told PTI recently.

"In the next two years, we will double the number of people in our IT team," Chand said after the announcement of its March quarter earnings.

Recently, the Reserve Bank of India has taken stringent action on banks for shortfalls in technology architecture which impacted the ability to execute transactions.

Apart from the 1,500 in-house workers, there are also contractual employees engaged by the bank in the IT function, Chand said.

The bank is wanting to hire contemporary talent as part of the efforts to significantly up its strength of IT professionals, he said.

The lateral talent will be across any grade, depending on the requirement and a candidate's experience, he said.

He also said that a generative artificial intelligence-based platform will soon be going live for customers wherein a slew of services could be availed in an interactive way.

Chand said that the bank has been spending aggressively on the technology front, including around Rs 2,000 crore investments on infrastructure alone, and will up the spends as the area comes under increased focus going ahead.

In FY24, the bank had a budget of Rs 743 crore on technology and the IT spend stood at Rs 453 crore, as per management commentary.

The bank is targeting to open 60 new branches during the fiscal year 2024-25.

In FY25, the bank will be targeting a credit growth of 12-14 per cent, backing it up with a deposit growth of 10-12 per cent and aspires to keep the NIMs at 3.15 per cent, Chand said.