SBI customer? How your bank is strengthening its digital payment platform - All you need to know

SBI customers alert! To strengthen its digital payment platform, the largest lender State Bank of India (SBI) has now entered into a joint venture with Hitachi Payment Services which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. This would be a merchant acquiring deal, where both entities will be working to enhance a state-of-the-art digital payments platform for India and other countries in the region. They aim to enable the offering of innovative products to suit the requirement of all segment of merchants, leveraging the brand value and unparalleled distribution network of SBI and bringing Artificial Intelligence and other technological capabilities of Hitachi to SBI Payment Services.

SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar said, “Through this Joint Venture, we aim to maintain our position as the top acquirer in the merchant digital payments space by providing technologically superior and seamless services to our customers. We will also utilise business analytics to develop strategies to penetrate into hitherto untouched Indian towns and cities through merchant centric digital payments solutions.”

Currently, SBI has the largest state-owned commercial bank in India, has more than 425 million customers, around 6,00,000 POS terminals, more than 16 lac merchant payment acceptance touch points and has migrated more than 80% of its transactions to alternate delivery channels. Now the new deal with Hitachi, will take this initiative further. 

Toshiaki Higashihara, President & CEO of Hitachi, Ltd., Japan, said “Hitachi’s joint venture with SBI, will further contribute to the development of digital payments in India by building a state-of-the-art digital payments platform and leveraging SBI’s robust customer network. This coincides with Hitachi’s vision to improve people's lives by providing digital solutions in India and other countries.”

Hitachi Payment Services empowers financial institutions with a comprehensive array of technology-led cash and digital payment solutions such as ATM Services, Cash Recycling Machines, POS processing services, Toll & Transit Solutions. 

Notably, Hitachi has been providing deployment, technology and management services for the card and digital acceptance payment network of SBI since 2011.