Deal signed to partner in payments business
MUMBAI: The State Bank of India (SBl) and Hitachi Payment Services private Ltd (Hitachi Payments), have signed definitive agreement to enter into a joint venture for the establishment of a state-of-the-art card acceptance and future ready digital payment platform for India.
“The JV agreement is subject to requisite regulatory approvals,” an official statement said.
SBI had shortlisted three companies – Hitachi, Worldline and First Data Corporation – for its joint venture (JV) partner in the merchant acquiring business more than a year ago.
The move was part of the SBI plan to transfer its business of deploying credit card swipe machines to a new entity that would be a JV with a payment company.
Based on an expression of interest (EoI) issued by SBI last year, the bank could receive several offers and from there five companies were shortlisted. Out of the list of five, three had submitted non-binding bids including Hitachi.
Hitachi is a global hardware provider and has a major presence in the payments business in India following its acquisition of Prizm Payments which was subsequently been renamed Hitachi Payment Services.
SBI is the largest deployer of credit card swipe machines in the country with around 6.30 lakh machines as per the latest statistics available. A big number of these machines were installed following the demonetization in November, 2016.
