By Nishit Navin and Ashwin Manikandan<\/p>\n
BENGALURU\/MUMBAI, May 5 (Reuters) – India’s Punjab National Bank is stepping up investments in cybersecurity and accelerating procurement \u200cof technology to guard against rising digital threats including those from advanced \u200cAI models, a senior executive said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The country’s third largest state-run lender by market \u200bcapitalisation has earmarked about 20% of its technology budget for cybersecurity, or roughly 7 billion to 8 billion rupees ($73.5 million – $84 million) for the current financial year, executive director D Surendran told Reuters in an interview, adding that this allocation is more \u200cthan 50% higher than the \u2060previous year.<\/p>\n
“We don’t want to compromise on this kind of expenditure,” Surendran said, adding the bank will increase the spending \u2060further if required.<\/p>\n
PNB’s move comes amid heightened regulatory focus on risks emerging from advanced AI models including Anthropic’s Mythos.<\/p>\n
Last month India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman met with \u200bheads of \u200btop banks to gauge preparedness against AI-related \u200bcybersecurity risks. India’s central bank \u200chas also been in talks with global regulators, lenders and government officials to understand the potential risks, Reuters has reported.<\/p>\n
PNB is also fast-tracking purchases of security tools, including firewalls and other systems to address vulnerabilities, Surendran said.<\/p>\n
“We have increased our frequency of audit\u2026 now we have made our audit process 24\/7 so \u200cthat the criticality will be identified fast,” Surendran \u200bsaid.<\/p>\n
PNB SEES SUSTAINED LOAN GROWTH<\/p>\n
The New-Delhi based \u200blender, earlier in the day, posted \u200ba more than 14% rise in net profit to 52.25 \u200cbillion rupees, helped by healthy loan \u200bgrowth and improving \u200basset quality.<\/p>\n
Loans grew 12.7% year-on-year while deposits rose 9.2%.<\/p>\n
The bank will target 12-13% loan growth in financial year 2026\/27, Surendran said, driven by credit \u200bto small and medium-sized \u200centerprises and retail loans, he said.<\/p>\n
The bank expects deposits to grow \u200baround 9-10% for the year.<\/p>\n
($1 = 95.2800 Indian rupees)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Nishit Navin \u200band Ashwin Manikandan; Editing by Ronojoy Mazumdar)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Nishit Navin and Ashwin Manikandan BENGALURU\/MUMBAI, May 5 (Reuters) – India’s Punjab National Bank is stepping up…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28909,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[53,313,18979,1415,18978,18980],"class_list":{"0":"post-28908","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-anthropic","8":"tag-anthropic","9":"tag-cybersecurity","10":"tag-d-surendran","11":"tag-india","12":"tag-punjab-national-bank","13":"tag-technology-budget"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}