The subsidiary of State Bank of India, SBI Payments will launch YONO Merchant App to provide low-cost digital payments infrastructure to merchants, the bank said.

SBI also said that YONO Merchant App will expand digitisation of merchant payments in the countrym as per PTI report.
"Aiming to enable millions of merchants through mobile-led technology to accept digital payments, SBI plans to deploy low-cost acceptance infrastructure across India over the next two years, targeting 20 million potential merchants across India in retail and enterprise segments."

The launch will help boost digital payments acceptance infrastructure in Tier III as well as Northeastern cities. YONO SBI Merchant will act as a soft PoS (point of sale) solution for which it has partnered with global payments technology major Visa to enable Tap to Phone feature.

This will also help accelerate infrastructure acceptance across the country. “It gives me immense pleasure to announce the launch of YONO SBI Merchant app by our digital payments subsidiary SBI Payments. The Bank launched YONO Platform three years ago, YONO, has 35.8 million registered users. YONO Merchant is a brand extension of this platform aiming to improve user experience and bringing convenience to our merchants,” SBI Chairman Dinesh Kumar Khara said.

Dinesh mentioned that in the next two-three years, SBI is aiming to digitize millions of merchants by upgrading their mobile phones into a PoS device accepting all form factors, accessing Value Added Services such as loyalty, GST invoicing, inventory management, among others and connecting into an interface to avail other banking products at a click of a button.

“We are aiming to grow our merchant touch points multi-fold, crossing five to 10 million within two to three years. YONO SBI Merchant is a great enabler for retail and enterprise merchants, offering a holistic product proposition to improve merchant engagement, user experience, and convenience,” said Giri Kumar Nair, MD and CEO, SBI Payments.

SBI said the launch of YONO Merchant is in line with RBI's recent announcement of creating a Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) to encourage acquirers to deploy Point of Sale (PoS) infrastructure (both physical and digital) in lesser penetrated areas of the country.

Merchants will now be able to turn their NFC-enabled Android smartphones into payment acceptance devices through a simple mobile app, it said.

"Our partnership with SBI is aimed at empowering more merchants with low-cost, innovative, simple and secure ways of accepting digital payments and forms an important part of our global commitment to digitally empower 50 million small businesses. We are confident that with SBI's presence around the length and breadth of the country, millions of consumers in smaller cities will be able to pay digitally and conveniently at their nearby stores," said TR Ramachandran, Group Country Manager, India and South Asia, Visa.

Ramachandran said as the number of consumers and merchants coming online goes up, seamless and secure digital payment experiences are essential to ensure they continue using digital payments and Visa continues to simplify payments with products like tokenisation.

"With India's smartphone base expected to reach 820 million in the next two years, both SBI and Visa firmly believe there is a tremendous opportunity to augment them as payment acceptance devices," said the release.

After the deployment of the service, merchants will also be able to access details of transactions, generate reports, and upload transactions for processing and others through SBI's mobile application besides accepting payments on their mobile device.