India's largest lender State Bank of India has entered into a partnership with FMCG major Hindustan Unilever to offer corporate solutions to its trade partners. These digitized solutions have been created to cater to the distribution and retail ecosystem of HUL. The partnership also aims to make availing of credit easy for channel partners, provides UPI based payment solutions and PoS terminals to retailers & distributors
The objective of the partnership is to augment the width of credit and will be beginning a pilot in Mumbai and Bengaluru.
"Our relationship with corporates was more around giving credit earlier. This new-age relationship caters to providing solutions to HUL's supply chain. Availing credit has always been a painful process. This process will be made simple by the integration of SBI's Yono platform and HUL's Shikhar app," said Rajnish Kumar, Chairman, State Bank of India.
HUL sees this as a transformative partnership as it will help its ecosystem of traders & retailers. "These trader ecosystems have been working in informal envt and don't have access to credit. There is also a reluctance to adopt digital technology. This partnership tries to resolve these constraints," said Sanjiv Mehta, Chairman & MD, HUL.
SBI will also be offering corporate packages for HUL employees to offer retail products at competitive prices. With this corporate relationship in place, SBI plans to use the same digital services to help other corporates achieve an end to end solutions.
"Have formed a corporate solution group to form a single point contact for corporates. Cashless transaction space is the need of the hour. The new vertical financial inclusion and micro-market will help reach out to remote geographies," said Dinesh Kumar Khara, MD, SBI.
