In India, majority of banks began using information technology for MIS. The inflexibility of Cobol programmes and batch processing was soon overcome by powerful desktop systems with rudimentary database systems, which allowed banks to analyse data, once it has been received in manual form from branches, transcribed into machine readable formats and validated. Quite a few of regulatory (which banks termed as statutory in those times) reports were also produced in this way. These earlier initiatives laid the foundations of BI in banking.