Indian Banks' Chief Information Officers Forum

Background

IN April 2015, the Fifth Conference of Chief Information Officers of Banks (CIOs/IT Heads) was held at IDRBT. A majority of the CIOs/IT Heads of Banks participated in this meeting, wherein the idea of forming a CIO Forum was discussed. The idea elicited an overwhelming support from all the delegates and the Institute initiated the process of forming a CIO Forum. 

Taking it forward, the Institute convened a meeting of a Core Group consisting of CIOs from banks to work out the modalities for the formation of the CIO Forum. This Core Group, in its meeting held on June 26, 2015 at IDRBT, decided to form The Indian Banks’ CIO Forum (IBCF). Dr. Raghuram G. Rajan, Governor, Reserve Bank of India & Visitor, IDRBT, inaugurated The Indian Banks’ CIO Forum on October 23, 2015.

Recent Meeting

The 13th meeting of the Institute’s CIO Forum was held on February 10, 2023. After a quick introduction, the forum deliberated on the following areas – Hollow the Core, 5G Enterprise for Banks, Ease 5.0 and Beyond, Cloud Implementation Strategies, and Opportunities and Challenges of Chief Digital Officers”.

The Director, as part of his inaugural talk, discussed the need of innovating technologies for better connectivity and performance and the challenges in scaling systems like UPI. He along with Dr. C. Subhrendu, also demonstrated the “Private 5G Mobile Edge Cloud” platform.

Dr. Abhishek Thakur led a discussion on enterprise 5G in context of banks. Transition of legacy platforms through standards based interfaces like N3IWF was discussed. Other topics discussed were skeletal blueprint for banks as 5G enterprise, next generation DBU, and use cases in AR/VR.

For the discussion on EASE 5.0 and beyond, Shri Pushkar Sinha, CIO, Canara Bank, discussed the broad focus areas of prior Ease of Access and Service Excellence initiatives. Shri Babu Thomas, CIO, Federal Bank, anchored the public cloud strategy discussion in which all the participants actively participated. Shri Rajesh Kumar Ram, CDO, Bank of India, discussed the Opportunities and Challenges from the perspective of Chief Digital Officers. Shri Srinivasa Rao, Senior Advisor, PSBT (IBA) presented the overview of challenges in realm of cassette swap. 29 participants from 27 banks participated.

The CIO Forum is fast emerging as a very focused and fruitful platform to enable the best of technology in the Indian Banking and Financial Sector. The CIO Forum is coordinated by Dr. Abhishek Kumar Thakur, Faculty, IDRBT.