Invalid Cheque Books

If you are an account holder in any of the six erstwhile banks that had merged with the public sector behemoth State Bank of India (SBI), your chequebook has become invalid from January 1, 2018. These banks include State Bank of Patiala, State Bank of Mysore, State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, State Bank of Travancore, State Bank of Hyderabad and Bharatiya Mahila Bank. Now customers will have to apply for new chequebooks and those will have a new Indian Financial System Code, or IFSC, an 11-digit alpha-numeric system that uniquely identifies all bank branches participating in the Reserve Bank of India’s fund transfer system. Recently, SBI changed the names and codes of nearly 1,300 of its 25,000 branches in the major cities owing to its merger with the five associate banks and the Bharatiya Mahila Bank.