State Bank of India plans to hire nearly 3,000 to 4,000 employees over the next year for a dedicated loan collection and recovery team, as the country’s largest lender moves to strengthen its early-stage stressed asset management and prepare for tighter Reserve Bank of India provisioning norms.
The plan was disclosed by SBI Chairman C S Setty on the sidelines of the bank’s Q4 FY26 earnings announcement. “Nobody can get this kind of asset quality, and we completely revamped our underwriting. We are now launching a strong collections mechanism. We will be employing almost 3,000 to 4,000 people on the loan-collection front,” Setty told Moneycontrol.
The new team will not be drawn from SBI’s existing 2.36 lakh-strong workforce. “They will not come from the existing employee base. Instead, we will look to leverage our subsidiary,” Setty said. Operations will, however, remain centrally supervised by the bank, with the recruits focused on tracking, managing, and recovering early-stage stressed loan accounts before they slip into the non-performing asset category.
The hiring push comes despite SBI maintaining one of the strongest asset quality positions in the Indian banking sector. The lender reported its highest-ever annual net profit of Rs 80,032 crore for FY26, up 12.9% year-on-year, with gross NPAs easing to 1.49% at the end of the March quarter.
The trigger lies in changing regulatory expectations. The Reserve Bank of India’s Expected Credit Loss framework requires banks to make provisions even for early-warning loan accounts classified under the Special Mention Account, or SMA-1 category. The new norms compress the time available to engage borrowers before provisioning kicks in, making preventive recovery a more time-sensitive function.
The structure being set up is somewhat similar to SBI’s earlier Stressed Assets Resolution Group, which focused on large-value stressed accounts. The new collection team, however, is expected to operate further upstream, working directly with retail and small business borrowers to prevent slippages.
The 4,000-strong recovery hire sits alongside SBI’s broader FY26 recruitment plan of around 18,000 employees announced earlier, covering clerical staff, probationary officers, locally based officers, and specialist officers. The bank has also been expanding its ATM Mitra and branch support staff network through its wholly owned subsidiary, State Bank Operations Support Services.
For job seekers, the loan recovery recruitment opens a route into banking-sector roles outside the traditional probationary officer and clerk recruitment process, with field-based postings expected across locations based on operational requirements. The hiring is expected to roll out over the course of FY27 through the bank’s subsidiary network.
SBI’s Q4 FY26 net profit rose 5.6% year-on-year to Rs 19,684 crore, though shares fell 6.62% following the results on concerns around net interest margin compression and the broader macroeconomic impact of the West Asia conflict.
