State Bank of India (SBI) and Hitachi Payment Services announced its joint venture for setting up card acceptance and digital payment platform for India.
SBI will have a majority stake in the JV. The new business will leverage SBI’s branch network and its relationship with corporates and Government to provide a technology-led payment service in the country.
Hitachi Payments has been providing deployment, technology and management services for the card and digital acceptance payment network of SBI since 2011.
The joint venture will provide payment options to customers and merchants focussing on areas such as roll-out of a nationwide card acceptance infrastructure, quick response (QR) code acceptance, Unified Payment Interface (UPI), mass transit sector and e-commerce businesses.
“At 2,500 PoS per million people, the penetration of payment acceptance infrastructure is still low. With this JV, we aim to grow the payment landscape by providing a frictionless modern digital payment platform to our customers,” Rajnish Kumar, chairman of SBI.
Toshiaki Higashihara, president and CEO of Hitachi, said that the Japanese tech company aims to further contribute to the development of digital payments in India by building a digital payments platform and leveraging SBI’s customer network.