Tejas K Bhanji: The Quiet Presence Behind Mumbai Postal Region’s CBS Success Story

More than 400 post offices in Mumbai have been brought on to the Core Banking Solutions (CBS) network, making the postal system in Mumbai the largest CBS –enabled network in the city. Even the major banks like SBI, ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank are way behind in terms of number of branches that are on CBS.

While the Post Office has won lavish praise for this achievement, it is time also to acknowledge a few selfless individuals whose tireless efforts made it possible. Notable among them is Tejas Kesarinath Bhanji, System Administrator and User Champion of CBS, presently working at the Postal Regional Office (RO) Mumbai RO.

As is well known, CBS is a software platform that interconnects the entire network of a banking organisation, standardises all operations, eliminates procedural errors and speeds up services. It also  enables  customers  to  operate  their  accounts  and  access banking  services  from  any  branch  on the  CBS  network,  regardless  of  the branch where  they  maintain  their account.  Thanks to CBS, a Post Office Savings Bank (POSB) customer in Mumbai  is  no  longer  a  customer  of  any  particular  post  office, but can avail the services from any of the 400 odd post offices of the city. Thus, CBS migration has considerably enhanced customer convenience and made “Banking Anywhere and Anytime” possible.

This initiative posed considerable challenges to the Post Office, as it involved numerous pre-migration activities, such as providing training to end users and user champions, maintaining a post-migration monitoring process, and ensuring end-of-day monitoring of migrated post offices. All these required deep subject knowledge and the stamina to put in long hours of tedious effort. In Mumbai Postal Region, Tejus Bhanji took up the challenge willingly, and came out with flying colours. His efforts did not end with this migration process, but extended to CBS support activities for assisting dozens of individual operators working in the field, via telephone and e-mail. His patience, innovation and dedication enabled him to manage all residual CBS issues single-handed.

A graduate in Commerce, Bhanji joined the Department of Posts in July, 2005 as a Postal Assistant in the Juhu post office. In 2008 he became the System Administrator at Andheri HO, and the next year, Instructor at the Work-place Training Centre (WTC), Mumbai GPO. As an instructor, Tejas Bhanji designed and conducted many training sessions at the WTC Mumbai GPO, invariably equipping staff members who lacked familiarity with IT with the knowledge and confidence required to handle IT systems. Thanks to his exemplary work, he was selected as System Administrator and CBS User Champion of Mumbai Postal Region in 2014.

The selection of Tejas Kesarinath Bhanji for the Best Performance Award of Maharashtra Circle at the Annual Divisional Heads Conference 2016-17, therefore, comes as no surprise. Mumbai Postal Region joins him in the celebration of this recognition. May his efforts and farsightedness bring more laurels to the Post Office.