SBI for nearly six-fold rise in PoS terminals to 100,000 by March

State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender, plans to take its point of sale (PoS) terminals to 100,000 by the end of this financial year, to expand its current account (CA) base.

“Our current PoS terminals are 18,500 and we plan to take it to 32,000 by October and 100,000 by March,” R Karthikeyan, chief general manager, corporate strategies and new businesses, told reporters on the sidelines of the Ficci-IBA banking summit.

SBI had engaged Visa International and Elavon as joint venture partners for setting up 600,000 PoS terminals across the country. However, this was called off in January this year, over differences on sharing of technology. The volume of transactions through a PoS is about Rs 4 crore a day for SBI, with the average size being Rs 2,800. Axis Bank is the market leader in this segment, with around 2,30,000 PoS terminals.

SBI is the largest debit card issuer in the country. It had about 100 million cards as of June.

“We want to leverage this number to expand our PoS terminals,” said Karthikeyan. “This is a part of our endeavour to promote more electronic transactions.” He said the bank would look to Tier-II and Tier-III towns and even rural areas to expand the base.

The bank’s CA share at the end of the first quarter was Rs 83,485 crore or 8.1 per cent of total deposits, down 187 basis points sequentially from 10 per cent.