State Bank of India Ltd. plans to offer merchant acquiring services through a new joint venture.
Visa Inc. and U.S. Bancorp's Elavon Inc. are the bank's U.S. partners in the joint venture called State Bank of India Payment Services. The bank announced the joint venture in May, and the service will be offered after it finalizes how much equity each of the venture partners holds.
The acquiring entity would install 150,000 point of sale terminals for debit and credit card acceptance across the country within the first year and deploy more than 600,000 terminals within the first five years of operations, O P Bhatt, SBI's managing director, said in the Economic Times, a newspaper in India.
The new venture would provide a full array of acquiring services, including acquiring bank identification numbers from the card schemes, merchant training and deploying and managing point of sale terminals.
