A day after Amazon pact, SBI signs deal with PayPal for cross-border transactions

Kolkata: Country’s largest lender State Bank of India today signed an MoU with digital payments company PayPal for facilitating cross-border transactions.[caption id=“attachment_2193965” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] New pact. Reuters[/caption] SBI managing director and group executive (national banking) B Sriram said the pact will help its nine lakh SME customers make such transactions in a safe and secured manner. Initially, he said, the MoU aims at facilitating cross-border transactions after which domestic payments would be covered. Subsequently, SBI would look into e-governance areas like e-visas, e-travel documents, he said. The facility would also be available to SBI debit card holders. Country Manager of PayPal Vikram Narayan said this is the first MoU with an Indian entity and this strategic partnership will help the SBI’s SME customer base in cross-border trade. PayPal has presence in 203 countries and processes 11.5 million transactions every day. Later, the company would also look at the e-commerce and m-commerce space in India, Narayan said. PayPal has development centres in Bangalore and Chennai. On Wednesday, SBI had signed a pact with e-commerce player Amazon to develop payment and commerce solutions for customers and small businesses. “Amazon is a very large company in the digital commerce space. We have a very large group of customers who could benefit by getting connected with this platform. The idea of the MoU is that we can try and give customers a good experience in both buying and selling,” SBI chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya had told reporters. PTI