80% of fintech is excel sheets getting sent from one system to the other. A lot of these were baby-sit earlier, and RBI changed this over a year or so. They asked for banks to make sure the processes were automated first, then lots of test-runs.
I think another important reason was that the morning rush (build-up of pending transfers) was causing issues and chokepoints. Smaller window-sizes helped fix that.
By babysit, do you mean someone used to go thru the sheets and update all the accounting stuff? I know its a bit idiotic question but I won't be really surprised if that's how it was.