NEW DELHI: India’s largest lender, State Bank of India, will launch a YONO merchants app to enable 20 million merchants from tier 2, 3 cities to adopt digital payments.
The lender plans to deploy low-cost acceptance infrastructure across India over the next two years targeting the potential merchants across India in the Retail and Enterprise segment.
The initiative will enable near field communication (NFC) enabled smartphones of merchants to turn into Pointof- sale devices after downloading the app.
“YONO Merchant App will expand digitization of merchant payments in the country,” SBI said in a statement. SBI said that it has partnered with Visa for the on-the-Tap phone feature, which aims to give the necessary boost to scale up acceptance infrastructure across the country.
The state-run lender also said that the launch is in line with the Reserve Bank of India’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. This initiative will help boost digital payments acceptance infrastructure in tier 3, 4 as well as north eastern cities.
“In the next 2-3 years, we are aiming to digitize 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,” said SBI Chairman Dinesh Kumar Khara.