Airtel Payments Bank plans to tie up with insurance companies and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) in the future to offer insurance and credit facilities, a company official said on Thursday.
“As per the Reserve Bank of India’s guidelines, payments banks are not allowed to lend, but it can offer third party financial products in the way other banks do,” said bank’s MD and CEO Shashi Arora.
“We plan to sell insurance and mutual fund products through our network in near future. After that, we will also offer loan products of other entities like NBFCs as we are not allowed to do lending directly,” he added.
The payments bank, which is a 80:20 joint venture between Bharti Airtel Ltd and Kotak Mahindra Bank, already opened two million customer accounts. It currently has a network of over 2.5 lakh neighbourhood Airtel retail stores, which also function as banking points.
The bank aims to scale its network to 6 lakh banking points and committed an investment of Rs 3,000 crore across its national operations. Arora also said the current interest rate of 7.25 percent per annum on deposits in saving accounts was “clearly to attract customers”.
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