SBI Payments, a subsidiary of India's largest lender State Bank of India, will inagurate YONO Merchant App to endow with low-cost digital payments infrastructure to merchants , the bank said on Saturday. YONO Merchant App will enlarge digitisation of merchant payments in the country, SBI said in a release.

"Aiming to enable millions of merchants through mobile-led technology to accept digital payments, SBI plan to deploy low-cost acceptance infrastructure across India over the next two years targeting 20 million potential merchants across India in retail and enterprise segment." This will enhance digital payments acceptance infrastructure in tier 3, 4 as well as north eastern 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. The partnerships endeavours to give the necessary boost to scale up acceptance infrastructure across the country, SBI said.

"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," Dinesh Kumar Khara, the Chairman of SBI, said. Khara said in the next 2-3 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 5-10 million within 2-3 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," Giri Kumar Nair, MD& CEO, SBI Payments said. 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 set up Point of Sale (PoS) infrastructure (both physical and digital) in lesser penetrated areas of the country. Merchants will now be capable 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," TR Ramachandran, Group Country Manager, India and South Asia, Visa said.

He said as the number of consumers and merchants approaching online goes up, flawless 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 consumption of the service, merchants will also be able to access details of transactions, generate reports, upload transactions for processing etc through SBI's mobile application besides accepting payments on their mobile device.