India's biggest bank traces its roots to a Calcutta bank founded in 1806
The State Bank of India only took that name in 1955, but its lineage reaches back to the Bank of Calcutta, opened in June 1806, which makes it the oldest commercial bank on the subcontinent. Over two centuries it has swallowed more than twenty other banks to become the largest lender in India.
Under British rule, three so-called Presidency banks served Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. The Calcutta bank, later renamed the Bank of Bengal, came first; Bombay's followed in 1840 and Madras's in 1843. Each was a joint-stock company created by royal charter, and until the Paper Currency Act of 1861 they held the exclusive right to issue paper money. In January 1921 the three amalgamated as the Imperial Bank of India, still privately owned.
Independence changed that. Under a 1955 law the Reserve Bank of India took a controlling 60% stake and renamed the institution. Because the central bank also regulates lenders, the government bought that holding directly in 2008 to remove the conflict of interest. From 1959 the State Bank absorbed banks that had belonged to the former princely states, keeping them as subsidiaries under names such as State Bank of Mysore and State Bank of Patiala to push lending into rural areas. One later rescue, Krishnaram Baldeo Bank, had begun as a small moneylending shop owned by a Maharaja.
Folding those associates in took years. Saurashtra merged in 2008 and Indore soon after, and the last five, along with a women-focused subsidiary, joined on 1 April 2017, lifting SBI into the world's 50 largest banks by assets. In 2013 Arundhati Bhattacharya became its first woman chair, and during a 2014 national push for financial inclusion it held 11,300 camps and opened over 3 million accounts in about a month.
Today it holds nearly a quarter of India's banking assets, employs close to 260,000 people and runs over 22,500 branches at home. Abroad it has about 245 offices in 29 countries, the first opened in Colombo in 1864. The Reserve Bank counts it among three Indian lenders deemed too big to fail.
Source: State Bank of India
