State Bank of India (SBI), the country's largest lender, has more than 5.27 million registrations for its Buddy Wallet at the end of the quarter ended December 2016 (Q3 FY17). Predictably, SBI saw a huge number of registrations for its wallet in the month of December when the demonetization of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes was under way. The bank saw more than 1.9 million registrations in December. The total number of transactions from April 2016 to December 2016 stood at Rs 12.012 million. The number of transactions was 3.86 million in December. Last month, SBI had been advertising in its branches and asking it to use its wallet instead of Paytm. Paytm says that it has over 180 million wallet users. SBI has also blocked net banking as an option to load money into most mobile wallets. Mobile banking: Its mobile banking app had over 9 million registrations since April 2016 and December 2016. The bank added 1.66 million customers on net banking in December. Th bank saw 160.143 million transactions from April-December 2016. The number of transactions in December stood at Rs 23.75 million. POS machines: Note that SBI has been aggressively pushing POS machine adoption in the country. In May 2016, it overtook HDFC Bank as largest issuer of POS terminals. Transactions worth Rs 36,071 crore took place in the period of April-December 2016. December saw transactions worth Rs 9,878 crore. SBI added 89,000 POS machines in the country from the April-December period. It also added around 60,000 merchants during the same…
