Redefining banking strategy, with focus on new generation IT applications in rural India, has become the prime need of the time to achieve customer-centricity in banking operations and to upkeep the internal efficiencies, experts said at the two-day BankTech Congress organized in Mumbai recently. "For long ATMs have been largely used for cash dispensation ... this has to change and banks are realizing the importance of making Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) their extended branches. Moreover, with increased mobile penetration, phone banking would have greater scope," Arvind Sharma, member secretary, Governing Council and director, Institute of Development and Research in Banking Technology, said speaking on 'modernization of banking services'. As high as 40% of Indians have emerged as mobile users making cell-phone-based banking all the more crucial in the near future. Touching upon three waves of IT applications in banking, he said efforts being made for introduction of low cost ATMs in rural Andhra Pradesh will go a long way in making banking mass-friendly along with its all hi-tech applications. He appreciated the initiative taken by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on introducing low-cost ATMs in rural areas and said the anomaly that ATMs are concentrated in largely urban pockets should go. Premier academic institutions like IIT, Madras and IIT, Bombay are already working on the modalities of introducing low-cost ATMs and IIT, Chennai has already developed models in this direction, he said. Anuj Bhargava, CIO, HSBC, stated that compliance was one of the most important issues facing the banking fraternity in the current scenario. Speakers said a need is being felt to sharpen the corporate imagination and stress on a comprehensive approach for issues pertinent to the banking arena. In his presentation on 'Building a robust disaster recovery architecture', G M Shenoy, vice president, National Stock Exchange of India, said NSE has gone a step beyond traditional concept of disaster recovery and has in place Business Continuity. "Under this, we prepare for eventualities well having a system other than replicating alternatives as in disaster recovery. This system had helped us during the crisis of July 26, 2005 when torrential rains and floods left Mumbai a devastated city." Like most organizations, NSE also had a distributed back-up system in place using direct-attached tapes, he said but the introduction of a 'centralized back-up solution' could save the day for them, he said. Sunil Pandita, partner manager of Adobe Systems India, made a presentation on how Adobe PDF is widely accepted as the de facto standard for electronic document exchange across verticals. Delegates from Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and South Africa also attended the meet.