State Bank of India (SBI) expects to complete the overhaul and modernisation of its core banking infrastructure within the next two years, a senior official said.

SBI Payments Services, the bank’s subsidiary, is also carrying out the same exercise.

Speaking at the Singapore FinTech Festival, SBI managing director Ashwini Kumar Tewari said the overhaul involves transforming the bank’s legacy systems through hollowing, microservices, modernisation and externalisation. 

The task is being carried out while maintaining the continuity, trust and resilience that define SBI’s operations, Tewari, who handles corporate banking and subsidiaries, added.

Elaborating on the approach, Tewari Wednesday said SBI has been working on a four-axis strategy -- upgrading its hardware, migrating from Unix to Linux, hollowing out the core by externalising functions such as vendor and government payments, and introducing microservices for operations like inquiries and accounting. 

The initiatives will help the bank to re-architect its core systems for greater agility and scale.

Underlining the technological shift, he said SBI is also building a private cloud infrastructure to ensure scalability while maintaining regulatory compliance and data security.

“We are modernising as we run the ship. Our systems must always remain on and available to customers," he said, adding that the bank's focus is on uninterrupted service continuity.

Discussing SBI's evolving partnership model with the fintech ecosystem, he said the narrative has moved from competition to collaboration.

To encourage innovation, SBI has developed a sandbox and innovation hub, opening access to nearly 300 APIs that allow fintechs to test and integrate their solutions with SBI’s systems.

Along with agility, convenience, intuitiveness, interface, security and compliance, the ability to meet the scale of SBI's operations is a crucial parameter for fintech onboarding, he added.

Tewari also revealed that SBI is now deploying agentic AI through a fintech partner to verify trade finance documents such as guarantees and letters of credit—helping both internal teams and customers achieve faster, more accurate processing. 

AI applications are also being explored in areas like service ticket resolution and document analysis to enhance operational efficiency, he added.