Travancore Bank Ltd. has come a long way from being a bank started by the Diwan of Travancore, C.P. Ramaswami Iyer in 1945. Headquartered at Thiruvananthapuram, it was a premier bank of Kerala and undertook general banking business in addition to the government treasury work and foreign exchanges business. It achieved the name ‘State Bank of Travancore’ after it became a subsidiary of the State Bank of India (SBI) in 1960 under the SBI Subsidiary Banks Act, 1959. On 31st March 2017, it merged with the State Bank of India. Before the merger, State Bank of Travancore had a network of over 1,100 branches and 1,600 ATMs.
State Bank of Travancore (SBT) was one of the popular public sector banks in India. It made quite a number of acquisitions over the years. These included Indo-Mercantile Bank (1959), Travancore Forward Bank (1961), Kottayam Orient Bank (1961), Bank of New India (1961), Vasudeva Vilasam Bank (1963), Cochin Nayar Bank (1964), Latin Christian Bank (1964), Champakulam Catholic Bank (1964), Bank of Alwaye (1965) and Chaldean Syrian Bank (1965). SBT provided services in 18 states and 3 Union Territories before merging with SBI.
State Bank of Travancore offers new-age banking services such as internet banking, mobile banking, SMS banking, e-payments, etc. to all of its customers. It has the largest network of ATMs in Kerala.