SBI YONO, the digital banking platform of India's largest lender, has a valuation of over $40 billion, according to Chairman Rajnish Kumar.
He also touted 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,” Kumar said at an event organised by ETBFSI.com on Wednesday. “If it was sitting outside banks, my valuation would be, may be, $40-50 billion for YONO, given the valuations which the startups get.”
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. Multinational consultancy McKinsey & Co. and International Business Machines Corp. helped SBI set up the platform.
And in just three years of existence, YONO is also a profitable platform, Kumar said.
According to the SBI chairman, YONO is adding more than 70,000 customers daily, and has onboarded 2.7 crore users in the last six months. At present, it is giving loans of over Rs 70 crore per day, including on weekends, he said.
The bank is also working on creating a B2B platform for bill receivables, called ‘Bharat Draft', which will have all the MSMEs registered, he said. The platform aims to get all businesses on a single platform to ensure that entities get finance against receivables.
Kumar said 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 Rs 10 crore to work directly with startups, he said.
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