SBI to launch YONO Merchant app for low-cost payments

SBI Payments, a subsidiary of India's largest lender State Bank of India (SBI), to launch YONO Merchant app to provide low-cost digital payments infrastructure to merchants. The company aims to boost digital payments acceptance infrastructure in tier 3, 4 as well as North Eastern cities. This would enable millions of merchants to accept digital payments through mobile led technology, SBI said in a press release.

SBI has partnered with Visa to offer tap to phone feature, which aims to give the necessary boost to scale up acceptance infrastructure across the country.

The state-owned lender plans to deploy low-cost acceptance infrastructure across India over the next two years targeting 20 million potential merchants across India in Retail and Enterprise segment.

The PSU lender said the launch is in line with RBI's recent announcement of creating a Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) to encourage acquirers to deploy Point of Sale (PoS) infrastructure (both physical and digital) in lesser penetrated areas of the country. Merchants will now be able to turn their NFC enabled Android smartphones into payment acceptance devices through a simple mobile app, it said.

Speaking on the launch Dinesh Kumar Khara, Chairman SBI said," It gives me immense pleasure to announce the launch of YONO SBI Merchant app by our Digital Payments subsidiary SBI Payments. The bank launched YONO Platform three years ago, YONO, has 35.8 million registered users. YONO Merchant is a brand extension of this platform aiming to improve user experience and bringing convenience to our merchants. In the next 2-3 years, we are aiming to digitise millions of merchants by upgrading their mobile phones into a PoS device accepting all form factors, accessing Value Added Services such as loyalty, GST invoicing, inventory management, etc and connecting into an interface to avail other banking products at a click of a button."

Giri Kumar Nair, MD& CEO, SBI Payments said, "SBI Payments is at fore front of innovation bringing state of the art products for our customers. We are aiming to grow our merchant touch points multi fold crossing 5-10 million within 2-3 years. YONO SBI Merchant is a great enabler for retail & enterprise merchants offering a holistic product proposition to improve merchant engagement, user experience and convenience."

With a number of consumers and merchants coming online, seamless and secure digital payment experiences are essential to ensure they continue using digital payments. While the State Bank of India has focused on providing innovative, best-in-class banking services and inclusion of new-to-digital merchants and customers, Visa continues to simplify payments with products like tokenization, it said.

With India's smartphone base expected to reach 820 million in the next two years, both SBI and Visa believe there is a tremendous opportunity to augment them as payment acceptance devices. Following the deployment, merchants will also be able to access details of transactions, generate reports, upload transactions for processing etc. through SBI's mobile application besides accepting payments on their mobile device.

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