The Reserve Bank of India vide its notification dated 7th April 2022 has published the guidelines on establishment of digital banking units. These guidelines are applicable to all Domestic Scheduled Commercial Banks (excluding Regional Rural Banks, Payments Banks and Local Area Banks).
The Scheduled Commercial Banks (other than RRBs, PBs and LABs) with past digital banking experience are permitted to open DBUs in Tier 1 to Tier 6 centres, unless otherwise specifically restricted, without having the need to take permission from Reserve Bank of India in each case.
Each DBU must offer certain minimum digital banking products and services. Such products should be on both liabilities and assets side of the balance sheet of the digital banking segment. Digitally value-added services to conventional products would also qualify as such. The DBUs are expected to migrate to more structured and custom made products, from standard offerings by use of its hybrid and high quality interactive capabilities.
In addition to onboarding of customers in a fully digital environment, various tools and methods shall be used by DBUs to offer hands-on customer education on safe digital banking products and practices for inducting customers to self-service digital banking services. This effort has to be clearly translated to incremental digital penetration of the financial services a DBU is catering to and will have to be monitored. The district where the DBU is located will be the catchment area for the purpose.
Further there should be adequate digital mechanism to offer real time assistance and redress customer grievances arising from business and services offered by the DBUs directly or through Business Facilitators / Correspondents.
