iNDICA NEWS BUREAU-
The State Bank of India will soon launch its online banking app, YONO Global, in the US and Singapore to offer inter-state digitalized remittances and other services. Services of SBI YONO Global are now available in nine countries.
“YONO Global will facilitate remittance services to SBI’s customers and will be rolled out as part of an understanding with the Monetary Authority of Singapore”, said Vidya Krishnan, deputy MD for IT at SBI at the Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF). In Singapore, SBI will tie up with the country’s payments processor PayNow to offer services via YONO, which is an acronym for ‘You only need one’.
Krishnan held talks with Singapore-based digital platform enablers as well as the local regulator and central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). “’We are constantly working on the remittance story between India and Singapore, given the large number of Indian diasporas in the city state,’” he said.
YONO was first launched internationally by SBI in the UK in 2019. The bank’s balance sheet for foreign operations is valued at 78 billion. The app will also help non-resident Indians to open NRE and NRO bank accounts. NRIs will also be able to use YONO to operate current and savings accounts. The app has become the gateway of 85 percent of all banking transactions, said SBI Chairman Dinesh Khara.
An agreement between the Reserve Bank of India and the Monetary Authority of Singapore has enabled remittances from Singapore via PayNow into India, and from India into Singapore by UPI. UPI is the flagship Indian peer-to-peer payment interface, while PayNow is Singapore’s dominant payment system.
SBI is now working on YONO 2.0 and the bank plans to roll out YONO in 2 more countries, taking the total count to 13, said CS Setty, MD for international banking at SBI.
