Loan growth, digitisation still unfinished agenda: Arundhati on last day at SBI

Bhattacharya, the first woman chair in the 214-year-old history of the bank, hang up her boots on Friday after being at the helm for four years.

"In one's life there is never a position where one can say that now the agenda is finished. What happens is that you start with an agenda and as you go on, you keep adding to it.

So, there has to be certain unfinished pieces of business," she said during her last media interaction.

"We were supposed to deliver on the digital front something that was really different and that was supposed to be sometime in July. Now, it has got delayed a little because the scope of the project has widened as we have gone along. That obviously is an unfinished agenda, but it does not matter because we have progressed hugely," she said.

Bhattacharya further said that despite taking major steps, the bank's credit growth has not been very healthy.

"While we've done everything possible to improve our understanding and monitoring of risk, of improving the processes, our credit underwriting standards, our follow-up processes, at the same time the credit growth are not where we wanted to. So that's an unfinished agenda," she said.

Stating that the bank has seen good, bad and neutral times, Bhattacharya said, "It's been a very interesting but very difficult journey as well, but I think we've gone through it well. These times of difficulties that we have had, I think we've used this in strengthening the bank and strengthening it internally so as to ensure that going forward that the bank is in much better position to be a part of the growth story".

The banker said she was hopeful that the bank will show better numbers in future.

Bhattacharya said there is going to be an uptick in the economy sooner rather than later.

She said the merger of five associate banks was in her mind when she became chairman but first wanted to strengthen the bank.