SBI YONO Worth over $40 Billion, Becomes Biggest Start-Up by Legacy Bank - Chairman Rajnish Kumar

By siliconindia  |  Thursday, 10 September 2020, 12:07:39 PM IST

SBI YONO Worth over $40 Billion, Becomes Biggest Start-Up by Legacy Bank - Chairman Rajnish Kumar

Rajnish Kumar, Chairman, State Bank of India has announced that the digital banking platform SBI YONO of India’s largest lender has attained a valuation of over $40 billion. He also claimed YONO as the biggest startup by a legacy bank. “The only thing is that because it is sitting in the bank, it does not get reflected in the valuations,” stated Rajnish an event organized by ETBFSI.com. “If it was sitting outside banks, my valuation would be, may be, $40-50 billion for YONO, given the valuations which the startups get,” he boasts.

State Bank of India had launched YONO - an acronym for ‘You Only Need One’ in November 2017 to address its customers’ banking, investment and shopping needs. To be more specific, YONO is an integrated digital banking platform that enables users to access a variety of financial and other services such as flight, train, bus and taxi bookings, online shopping, or medical bill payments. YONO is offered as a smartphone app for both Android and iOS. Multinational consultancy McKinsey & Co. and International Business Machines Corp. helped SBI set up the platform. In just three years of existence, YONO has also etched its name as a profitable platform, stated Rajnish. According to him, YONO is adding more than 70,000 customers daily, and has on-boarded 2.7 crore users in the last six months. At present, it is giving loans of over 70 crore per day, including on weekends.

Rajnish also stated that the bank is also working on creating a B2B platform for bill receivables, called ‘Bharat Draft’, which will have all the MSMEs registered. The platform aims to get all businesses on a single platform to ensure that entities get finance against receivables. SBI works with startups in a slew of areas, including cybersecurity and fraud prevention, and is also looking at investing in some of them. The bank’s board has also approved a spending limit of 10 crore to work directly with startups, he said.

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