State Bank Of India

State Bank of India, country’s largest public sector lender is likely to install authentication biometric devices at select branches in the country for preventing manipulation of its core banking solution platform. At the start, the bank intends to install 5,000 such devices. It aims to install them in all its 14,700 branches in the future.

The banks employees will be using these live scan capture devices, single finger capture and authentication biometric device at the front-end in branches in conjunction with a backend, centralized biometric authentication software solution. These will be used as a second factor authentication of the users of the bank's core banking solution, where the primary user authentication will continue to be user ID and password.

SBI has reported a better-than expected net profit of Rs 3,263 crore for the quarter ended December 2011, up 15.38% from Rs 2,828 crore in the corresponding quarter last year. Profits were driven by an improvement in net interest margin which widened to 4.05% from 3.61% a year ago.