Co-brandings with e-commerce players not up to expectation: SBI chief Rajnish Kumar

Country's largest public sector lender State Bank of India (SBI) has said that its tie-ups with various e-commerce players, including Snapdeal and Flipkart, have not yielded the desired results so far and is thus reworking the strategy to increase the volume.

As part of supply chain finance, SBI had tied up with Snapdeal, Flipkart, Amazon and taxi aggregator Ola to offer easy working capital to their vendors.

"Somethings you invest but you don't get any immediate outcome. We did tie up with Flipkart, Snapdeal and taxi aggregators, but the outcome is not as per our expectations," Chairman Ranjish Kumar said at an event in Mumbai over the weekend.

He said despite the availability of technology at the bank the volumes were not high as sometimes these e-commerce players themselves provide funds to their lenders, which affects the volumes for the banks.

"Many times these companies themselves provide finance to their vendors so the need for bank finance is not much. It is a constant review process for us and if we have to make our product more attractive we will make it," Kumar said.

He, however, hopes the transaction volumes will increase in near future. "The fact is having invested in the technology, we have not lost hope. I feel that we have the platform and sooner or later we will be able to make use of these platforms," Kumar said.

Last November, the bank launched a digital platform Yono, which provides all financial services of the bank and its subsidiaries under one app.

The platform allows customers to open an SBI bank account digitally, transfer funds, avail of pre-approved personal loan sans any paperwork and get overdraft facility against the fixed deposit.

The bank is also in the process of integrating all the financial services products from SBI and its subsidiaries with the platform.

"The response for Yono is tremendous. So far, the downloads have exceeded 2.5 million and registration have exceeded 1 million. We have added general insurance product also. In few days mutual fund products will also be available," he said.

Kumar said the digital platform is currently offering products to retail customers and the bank is working on offering similar services to corporates also.

"We are working on whether there can be a Yono application for corporates but it is much more complicated. It will take another year," he added.