Unity Small Finance Bank:
The Reserve Bank of India issued a small finance bank (SFB) licence to a consortium of fintech company BharatPe and Centrum Financial Services Ltd.
- The new business entity “Unity Small Finance Bank” will see Centrum’s MSME and micro finance businesses merged into itself.
- In a statement, Centrum Group’s Executive Chairman Jaspal Bindra said: “We aspire to be India’s first Digital Bank”.
- This sheds light on the need for traditional lenders to expand their digital infrastructure in order to address the market’s requirement for digital products.
- There have been several examples of small finance banks and non-banking financial companies collaborating with fintech companies to access and monetise the data collected by these consumer tech firms.
- This has particularly gained momentum in the buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) and the micro-lending models, where companies like Paytm, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, etc have partnered with NBFCs to assess creditworthiness of an existing customer and present it to the lender as a potential borrower.
