PM Modi commends RBI's digital innovation as it bags Central Banking award

"A commendable accomplishment, reflecting an emphasis towards innovation and efficiency in governance. Digital innovation continues to strengthen India's financial ecosystem, thus empowering countless lives," the Prime Minister wrote on X on Sunday afternoon.

Central Banking, London, UK, has selected the Reserve Bank of India for the Digital Transformation Award 2025.

RBI was awarded and recognised for its initiatives, including the Pravaah and Sarthi systems, which were developed by the in-house developer team.

The awards committee noted how these digital initiatives have reduced the use of paper-based submissions, thus transforming RBI's internal and external processes.

For more than 30 years, London-headquartered Central Banking has provided independent coverage, detailed data analysis, expert training and truly global networking events.

In a citation written by the Central Banking staff, the Reserve Bank of India is termed a "big and complex organisation" with around 13,500 staff members spread across more than 40 branch offices.

"It calls itself a 'full service' central bank, in the sense that it performs just about every role a central bank can perform, from promoting monetary and financial stability to managing reserves, supervising banks and non-banks, printing notes, handling payments and managing the government's debt, among many other functions," the Central Banking article read.

Central Banking also took note of the increasing digitalisation initiatives taken up by the RBI.

"Until recently, these roles were heavily paper-based, with a lot of manual intervention and uneven adoption of digital tools," the article added.

It noted the work done by the former RBI governor Shaktikanta Das.

During his tenure, Das made it a strategic priority to enact a digital transformation to standardise and streamline workflows, cut costs and raise transparency.

Two initiatives have been key to this work. Through Sarthi, RBI's internal workflows were digitised. It went live in January 2023, helping employees to store and share documents securely, improving record management and increasing the options for data analysis through reports and dashboards.

In May 2024, in the second stage of digitalisation, Pravaah was launched. It created a digitised means for external users to submit regulatory applications to the RBI.

"Pravaah has so far allowed more than 70 different regulatory applications to be digitised, supporting the work of nine RBI departments," the Central Banking article read. (ANI)