India’s largest commercial bank the State Bank of India said that its tie up with Snapdeal for funding MSMEs will boost Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make-in-India initiatives by putting more funds in the hands of the small entrepreneurs enabling them to boost their industries.
Addressing a press meet here after signing a deal with Snapdeal CEO Kunal Bahl, SBI Chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya said that while the e-commerce company had a major presence in the digital space, SBI led in financing.
Under this pact, SBI will offer easy loans to MSME traders and manufacturers on the Snapdeal platform enabling them to scale up operations. There will be concessional interest rate for women entrepreneurs and zero collateral security for loans up to Rs.1 crore. Traders will get collateral free loans up to Rs. 25 lakh.
Mr. Bahl said that boosting ecommerce infrastructure rather than immediate profitability was Snapdeal’s immediate goal. The three year old company offers 11 million products through 10,000 sellers, delivering to 5,000 towns and cities.
The SBI chief said that this will be part of Make-in-India campaign of Prime Minster Modi and the bank would enter into more such strategic pacts with Snapdeal by 2016-17. She saw a boost to SBI MSME book ( Rs.1.7 lakh crore till 2014-15 third quarter).
Earlier during the day, SBI announced another partnership in the digital space — with Paypal — the open digital payments company, to promote cross-border trade and payments facilitation for SBI and Paypal users in India and overseas.
SBI Managing Director B. Sriram said that this deal would bring new opportunities to SBI’s SME customer base. It would help Indian merchants gain a global audience. This would enable Indian exporters to gain access to a global audience.
