NEW DELHI: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday inaugurated Airtel Payments Bank of Bharti Enterprises, which is being rolled out across the country with an investment of Rs 3,000 crore.
“As more and more telecom companies enter into the fray, I think we will hopefully, see competition not only amongst telecom companies which we read a lot about these days, but probably see a competition between conventional and new mode of banking,” Jaitley said.
Speaking at the launch event here on Thursday, Bharti Enterprises Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said that the aim would be to convert at least 100 million of Airtel’s 270 million customers into Airtel Payments Bank customers. While Bharti Airtel has 80 per cent stake, Kotak Mahindra Bank has 20 per cent stake in Airtel Payments Bank.
“We are starting operations with 2.5 lakh outlets,” said Airtel Payments Bank Managing Director and CEO Shashi Arora. With this national rollout, Airtel Payments Bank has a network of 2,50,000 banking points, (Airtel retail stores) across 29 Stat3es from day one. This is more than the total number of ATMs in the country
However, expressing satisfaction that digitisation is expanding at a much faster space than anticipated, Jaitley also said that excessive use of paper currency is detrimental to society and hoped banking transaction charges will fall with the entry of new players.
Transformation of post offices into a bank will be the next revolution, he added. Airtel first started its payments bank pilot in Rajasthan across 10,000 retail outlets on November 23, 2016, and later rolled out pilot services in Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.