Banks should take lead on workforce standardisation: RBI Deputy Governor (Second Lead)

Kolkata, May 19 : Arguing in favour of workforce standardisation in the banking and financial sectors, Reserve Bank of India Deputy Governor Viral Acharya on Friday urged the banks to come up with leadership and initiative to achieve the goal.

"Workforce standardisation is needed. But it can't be everything coming from the central bank. The banks can also take some leadership and initiatives," he said on the sidelines of 'Ninth ICC Banking Summit 2017' organised by the Indian Chamber of Commerce here.

"We have commercial lenders, we have two big mortgage lenders and a few big lenders in the MSME segment. I think they can really set the standards by evolving the data templates themselves and then they could be rolled out with the rest of the industry," Acharya added.

Describing the Indian banking system as a "fertile ground with a lot of potential", he said the data standard should be improved before pushing for data analytics in the credit industry.

"We want to push this forward as I said it is a long time measure. But we need to develop the data standards first, do the collection and aggregation and then, hopefully disseminate it," he added.

Acharya emphasised on the need of creating a diagonal economic and financial services.

"Alongside bank and other financial institutions, we need to develop a whole diagonal ecosystem of economic and financial data and financial services, that should collect, collate and generate new data points in the financial market," he said.

He also claimed that information analytics that deals with immediately usable data forms, would help in creating information-based business opportunities.

"This would let people understand where to invest money and which part of the country can be used for investing in which sector. This would also help in analysis based policy making," he said.

Citing the example of e-commerce data that gets literally created during the transactions, Acharya advocated the creation of inflation-consumption data matrices on a real time basis and production of better employment data within the formal economy.

He also emphasised on the importance of quantifying "the rural and informal economy" in a better way to understand the impact of major policy changes like demonetisation.