India's largest commercial bank and largest telecom operator are joining forces: State Bank of India and Bharti Airtel have announced a joint venture to offer customer mobile money transfer, mobile payments and cash-in, cash-out remittances across India. The incorporation of the JV, likely to be called SBI-Airtel, is expected to be completed by 31st March, 2011; Airtel will hold 49%, while SBI will hold 51% stake in the venture. While, the CEO will be from SBI, Airtel will nominate a COO. According to SBI Chairman, OP Bhatt, this tie-up will be an exclusive one and other telecom operators wont be approached by SBI. Both companies will invest Rs 100 crore in the business, and they're targeting 3-4 million customers in the first year. JV Will Become Banking Correspondent Of SBI The JV will become a Business Correspondent of SBI and enable new and existing customers to open regular and no-frills account and avail of other banking products and services at Airtel's 1.5 million retailers who will act as Customer Service Points (CSP) all over India. The launch will be extended to all regions in a phased manner. MediaNama readers might recall that in September 2010, the Reserve Bank of India allowed telecom operators to sign up as Banking Correspondents, following which Idea Cellular tied up with Axis Bank. SBI-Airtel service will be available for all service platforms including USSD, SMS and Voice; the customer will get a SIM card which will have the service integrated with it. It will work on a…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...