Alert SBI customers! From December 31, cheque books of these 6 banks will be invalid

The State Bank of India has asked its customers to stop using cheque books of its 6 subsidiary banks as they would be invalid from December 31 onwards.

The country's biggest public lender has asked the account holders of State Bank of Patiala, State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, State Bank of Raipur, State Bank of Travancore, State Bank of Hyderabad and Bhartiya Mahila Bank to submit the application to change the cheque book and said that Old cheque books and IFSC codes will be invalid after December 31.

After the merger, cheque books of the erstwhile associate banks were supposed to have been invalid after September 30. However, SBI later extended the due date for availing new cheque books of the former associates till December 31, 2018.

Earlier, this month, State bank of India has changed names and Indian Financial System Code (IFSC) codes of nearly its 1,300 branches. The move came after the country's biggest lender has merged five of its branches into itself.

The branches whose names have been changed are located in major cities such as Mumbai, New Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Lucknow, among others. SBI that has close to 23,000 branches has put up the list of branches with old and new names and IFSC codes on its website.

SBI’s managing director (retail and digital banking), Praveen Gupta said, "Some of our old associate branches are getting merged with SBI branches. When that merger happens, the IFSC codes get changed".

Customers have been informed about the change in IFSC codes, but internally also the bank has mapped them to the new codes.

But what exactly has happened, will it has an impact on your payment services via cheque? Let us tell you in details:

To elaborate SBI's move further, first let us understand what is an IFSC code? The IFSC is an 11-digit alpha-numeric code is used to identify all bank branches participating in any Reserve Bank of India regulated funds transfer system.

The IFSC code is required to transfer money from one account to another using RTGS, NEFT or IMPS methods.

State Bank of India