State Bank of India Is Global Finance's World's Best Consumer Bank for a Second Year, With 10.02 Crore Registered YONO Users and 23,265 Branches

Global Finance, the New York finance magazine, has named State Bank of India (SBI) its World’s Best Consumer Bank for 2026. The title is the same one the bank won in 2025, which makes this its second year in a row. SBI’s chairman, Challa Sreenivasulu Setty, received it at the magazine’s ceremony in Bangkok, and SBI’s release says the bank also took Global Finance’s Best Bank in India title for 2026.

What the magazine announced, and when

Global Finance posted the 2026 winner on its website on 16 July 2026, three months before the ceremony. Its announcement lists SBI as the World’s Best Consumer Bank, alongside Santander (World’s Best Bank), DBS Bank (Corporate Bank), BBVA (Emerging Markets Bank), Ecobank (Frontier Markets Bank) and CIBC Mellon (Sub-Custodian Bank).

The ceremony itself was set for the morning of 17 October at the Dusit Thani hotel in Bangkok, during the IMF and World Bank annual meetings. The IMF’s own page puts those meetings in Bangkok from 12 to 18 October 2026. SBI’s release, carried by FinTech BizNews on 17 October, says the awards were presented on the sidelines of the meetings, and Hello Banker, reporting on the same day, places the chairman in Bangkok when he received them. Global Finance’s own page, which this article could open, covers the Consumer Bank title; the Best Bank in India title for 2026 rests on SBI’s release as carried by those two outlets.

The 2025 title came the same way: Global Finance named SBI that year in July, and the ceremony was in Washington on 18 October 2025. ANI reported on 23 October 2025 that SBI had received both the Consumer Bank and the Best Bank in India awards for 2025.

What the magazine said about SBI

Global Finance’s founder and editorial director, Joseph Giarraputo, is quoted on the award page saying SBI “pairs access with innovation and dependability”. The page describes a bank with more than 520 million customers, over 22,500 branches and 63,580 ATMs, plus a network of business correspondent outlets (agents who bring banking to places without a branch). It calls SBI a key enabler of financial inclusion.

The 2025 announcement gave a different reason: Giarraputo credited the bank’s customer engagement, digital transformation and wider accessibility.

How the winners are chosen

Global Finance says its editors select the winners, with input from industry analysts, corporate executives and technology experts. Its methodology page describes a proprietary algorithm that narrows the field and scores each contender out of 100, using criteria such as financial strength and safety, governance, innovation, risk management and technology use. Entering is optional.

The same page states that the panel generally favours private-sector banks over government-owned ones. Drishti IAS and Hello Banker both describe SBI as a public sector bank. The award is the magazine’s editorial judgment, not a ranking by a regulator. SBI’s release lists the magazine’s criteria as customer service, innovation, digital transformation, accessibility and financial inclusion.

YONO: 10.02 crore registered users

SBI’s release says the bank launched the New YONO platform, crossed 10 crore registered YONO users and introduced AI-powered customer services in the past year. A crore is 10 million, so the bank is describing a user base of about 100 million people.

The bank’s own filings back the number. The analyst presentation for 2025-26 reports 10.02 crore registered users on YONO as of 31 March 2026, and the Q4 results press release says more than 66 per cent of savings accounts were opened digitally through YONO in the year. The presentation also gives the share of transactions through alternate channels (internet, mobile, UPI and similar) as about 98.7 per cent in 2025-26, up from about 98.2 per cent the year before.

UPI, India’s real-time payments system, is part of that. The same presentation counts 4.21 crore UPI users on YONO, with an average of 4.74 lakh transactions a day in the January to March 2026 quarter against 3.10 lakh a year earlier. How the system stacks up internationally is in our piece on how UPI compares with the world’s payment systems.

Branches: 23,265 at the end of March 2026

SBI’s release says it added more than 300 branches over the year. The analyst presentation shows the branch count at 22,937 on 31 March 2025 and 23,265 on 31 March 2026, a net rise of 328. Global Finance’s page quotes the older figure of over 22,500, so the two numbers differ because they were taken at different dates.

On the same page, the presentation says savings deposits continue to grow with “minimal addition to branches”, and the press release says more than 66 per cent of new savings accounts were opened through YONO in the year. Account access is also the subject of our explainer on the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, the national programme of basic accounts.

The year in the bank’s accounts

The same Q4 press release gives the bank’s results for the year to 31 March 2026. Net profit was Rs 80,032 crore, up 12.88 per cent. Total business crossed Rs 109 trillion, with deposits at Rs 59.8 trillion and advances at Rs 49.3 trillion. The gross NPA ratio, the share of loans that have gone bad, was 1.49 per cent, 33 basis points better than a year earlier, and the net NPA ratio was 0.39 per cent. Return on assets was 1.12 per cent.

These are the bank’s published results, not part of Global Finance’s announcement, and they are given here for context. Nothing in this article is investment advice.

What comes next for YONO

In an interview with PTI on 14 December 2025, the day before the new version launched, Setty said the app had almost 10 crore users and that SBI wanted at least 20 crore within two years. He told PTI that reaching it would need significant infrastructure investment. A second PTI report, on 15 December 2025, put the user count at 9.60 crore at launch and said the bank planned to have 10,000 executives in branches by 31 March 2026 to help customers move to digital channels.

SBI’s presentation for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, published on 7 August 2026, lists 10.5 crore registered customers on YONO and more than 5 crore registrations on the new YONO, against the 20 crore target.