RBI Supervisory Data: Private Lenders Score Better Than Public Sector

Reserve Bank of India released its supervisory data quality index on Wednesday, where private banks scored higher than public sector peers. According to the data released by the central bank, private lenders scored 89.6 on the sDQI, compared with 88.8 by public sector lenders in March 2025.

A year ago, public sector banks scored 89.2 on the sDQI scale, higher than 88.9 scored by private banks.

Small finance banks scored the highest at 90.6 this year, marginally dipping from 91 last year. The sDQI "measures data quality in terms of the Accuracy, Timeliness, Completeness and Consistency in the submission of returns."

The supervisory submissions include return on asset liability and off-balance sheet exposures, return on asset quality, return on operating results, risk based supervision return, liquidity return, return on capital adequacy, central repository of information on large credits.

While private banks saw improvement in key areas such as accuracy, timeliness and consistency of their submissions, public sector banks saw a dip in these metrics.

As a system, scheduled commercial banks reported an sDQI score of 89.3 as of March 2025, compared with 88.6 a year ago.

Out of 87 regulated entities measured under sDQI, 44 scored between 80-90, while 42 scored above 90. Only one entity scored between 70-80 on the scale.

According to the regulator's scale, a supervisory score between 70-80 needs improvement, 80-90 is acceptable and above 90 is considered good. A score below 70 indicates major supervisory concerns.

"The sDQI provides a comprehensive and quantitative measure of the supervisory data quality, forming the basis for supervisory examinations...This is expected to bring better discipline in reporting supervisory data and also lead towards better inferences for the supervisors," RBI said in its methodology for the score.