India’s largest public lender State Bank of India actively looking to hive off its digital platform You Only Need One (Yono) App into a separate subsidiary, its chairman Rajnish Kumar said at a banking and finance conference, Sibos 2020.
“There is very serious thinking going on and we are in discussions with all our partners to hive it (Yono) off as a separate subsidiary,” said Kumar adding that once Yono becomes an independent entity then even SBI would become its user or one of the users.
However, Kumar added, the discussions are at an early stage and the valuation of Yono has also not been done so far.
It is worth mentioning that recently, Kumar had said Yono could have a valuation of around USD 40 billion.
“The statement (on valuation of Yono) which I made was that if I look at valuations of all the start-ups and compare then definitely Yono should not be less than USD 40 billion. As of now we have not done any valuation exercise but that is what I believe is the potential,” Kumar said.
The State Bank of India launched the Yono platform in November 2017 with an aim to give an alternate solution to its customers in their banking, investment and shopping requirements. Around 5.5 million users login in Yono on a regular basis. Along with this, it witnesses with over 4,000 daily disbursals of personal loans and 16,000 Yono Krishi Agri Gold loans.
The app has seen over 56 million downloads with more than 27 million users.