SBI selects Elavon-Visa consortium as merchant acquiring business partner
05 May 2010
State Bank of India (SBI), the country's largest lender, has selected a consortium of Elavon Inc and Visa International, both of the US, as its joint venture partner for merchant acquiring business.
Merchant acquiring business involves the facilitation of payment through debit or credit card at the retail outlets. This would involve acquiring bank identification numbers (BINs) from schemes, as well as managed services for point of sale (PoS) terminals among others.
Managed services would include deployment and maintenance of POS terminals at customer locations, training of manpower etc.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has already approved the setting up of a wholly owned subsidiary, SBI Payment Services (P) Ltd, for conducting merchant acquiring business by SBI and the terms of arrangement are being worked out, SBI said in a filing with the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE).
SBI is planning to deploy six lakh POS terminals across metros, urban, semi-urban and rural centres in the country in the first five years of operations.
The State Bank Group has over 18,000 ATMs across the country and has issued over 60 million debit cards.