Have accounts with these banks? Your cheque book, IFSC code will become invalid from 1 October

For the customers who hold accounts in six state-run banks, here’s a reminder. Sunday, or 1 October is an important date for you because that is the day their cheque books and India Financial System (IFS) codes of their branches would become invalid. These banks are — 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 (BMB). [caption id=“attachment_4010455” align=“alignleft” width=“300”]  Representational image. Reuters[/caption] The government had in February approved the merger of these five associate banks with SBI. Later in March, BMB too got the approval to join the group. With these six banks merging, SBI now becomes a bank with total assets worth Rs 29 lakh crore. The bank has been asking customers of all these banks to apply for SBI cheque books via net banking, mobile banking, ATM, or by visiting the home branch. Which means if you still haven’t applied for the new cheque books, you have to do it at the earliest. This is because the cheque books issued by these six banks cannot be used. Also if you have issued any post-dated cheques, you need to take care of them. It’s better you iron out these issues beforehand, if possible today itself. This means you will have to recall the post-dated cheques and issue new ones. In the past, most acquiring banks let the fixed deposits run their course. Which means old terms continue. As far as mobile banking goes, you will have to make sure that you make the necessary changes there as well. Since the old IFSC code is no longer valid you will have to start using the new IFS code. However, SBI hasn’t said a word about ECS issued by the customers of these half a dozen banks. It is safe to deduce that they SBI will take care of things at the back-end, and you need not worry about it. That’s how it has been whenever bank mergers happened. For instance, a few years ago when United Western Bank merged with IDBI Bank, the latter used an account mapping technique for ECS, without discomforting the customers.