Payment banks to have initial corpus of Rs 800 crore: Ravi Shankar Prasad

Communications Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Monday said the payments bank of the posts department will have Rs.800 crore corpus at the beginning.

"The payments bank of the department of posts will be functional by March 2017. It will initial have a corpus of Rs.800 crore, out of which Rs.400 crore will be equity and rest will be grant," he told reporters while announcing various achievements of his ministry in the last two years.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on August 2015 granted `in principle` approval to 11 applicants, including Reliance Industries Ltd., Aditya Birla Nuvo Ltd., Department of Posts and Cholamandalam Distribution Services Ltd., to set up payment banks.

The others who got the approval are Airtel M Commerce Services Limited, Fino PayTech Limited, National Securities Depository Limited, Dilip Shantilal Shanghvi, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Tech Mahindra Limited and Vodafone m-pesa Limited. 

The payment banks will cater to the needs of small savings accounts, remittance services, low income households, small businesses and other unorganised sector entities.

The minister also flagged off 14 vans of Digital India Outreach Campaign with the objective to create awareness about the programme.