Catching up on the growing fintech and payments scene, Reliance Jio has also confirmed their plans to start ‘Jio Payments Bank’ last year. And the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), on Tuesday, officially announced that Jio Payments Bank had commenced operations starting April 3, 2018. The Reserve Bank of India in their official statement said: "The Reserve Bank has issued a licence to the bank under Section 22 (1) of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949 to carry on the business of payments bank in India."
Interestingly, Reliance Industries Limited wasn’t the only one to receive the license on Tuesday. The intense growth of the online payment sector has propelled a lot of companies to capitalize on the opportunity. As a result of that, Reliance Jio was one of the 11 applicants who were issued an in-principle approval for setting up a payments bank. Back in 2015, Reliance Jio was amongst the 11 applicants for starting the payments bank service in India.
Already, big players such as Paytm and Bharti Airtel have started payment operations under Paytm Payments Bank and Airtel Payments Bank last year. And now, Jio is entering the segment with Jio Payments Bank.
It should be noted that RBI has conceptualised the idea of Payments bank as small entities which carry on activities like providing small savings accounts and payments or remittance services, meaning that these firms don’t scale their operations to full-fledged banking but still offer widely used payments services which are mainstream in the day to day operations. Details about the Jio Payments Bank are yet to be revealed, but the company last month have sent messages to all the JioMoney users that the wallet service will be merged to Jio Payments Bank once it begins the operations.
