India's Largest Bank SBI Inks Payments Deal With Hitachi

India’s largest bank State Bank of India (SBI) on Tuesday announced launch of joint venture with Japanese conglomerate Hitachi for a card acceptance and digital payments platform in India.

Hitachi Payment Services, a unit of Hitachi will hold 26 percent stake in the JV, SBI Payment Services.

The joint venture will establish a state-of-the-art digital payments platform for India and other countries in the region, SBI said in a statement.

SBI has more than 420 million customers and more than 600,000 Point of Sale (PoS) terminals and is currently the largest merchant acquirer in the Indian market in terms of terminals through its subsidiary SBI Payment.

Last year in October, SBI had shortlisted three companies - Hitachi, Worldline and First Data Corporation - for a JV in the merchant-acquiring business and had proposed to transfer its business of deploying credit card swipe machines to the new entity.

“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,” said Rajnish Kumar, SBI chairman.

"We will also utilise business analytics to develop strategies to penetrate into hitherto untouched Indian towns and cities through merchant centric digital payments solutions," he added.

This SBI-Hitachi joint venture is expected to facilitate expansion of the digital payments landscape in India by creating a state-of-the-art digital payments platform that will enable offering of innovative products to suit the requirement of all segment of merchants.

The JV could successfully leverage the brand value and unparalleled distribution network of SBI and bringing Artificial Intelligence and other technological capabilities of Hitachi, the statement said.

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

The Hitachi unit provides 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.