Jio Financial Services Takes Complete Control Of Jio Payments Bank

About two months after announcing its plans to acquire Jio Payments Bank Ltd (JPBL), fintech company Jio Financial Services (JFS) has completed the acquisition for INR 104.5 Cr. 

In an exchange filing, JFS said it bought 7.91 Cr shares of JPBL from State Bank of India (SBI), making the payments bank its wholly owned subsidiary. In March, the company had said it would buy SBI’s complete stake in the bank in a deal for INR 13.22 per share. 

During JFS’ Q4 earnings call, its CEO Hitesh Sethia said that JPBL had been seeing substantial growth in its customer base. 

“JPBL has seen substantial growth in its customer base which has tripled year-on-year to 2.31 Mn and deposits also has tripled to INR 295 Cr. In March this year, we signed an agreement to acquire State Bank of India’s remaining stake in Jio Payments Bank,” he added. 

The bank’s product portfolio includes CASA variants, including sweep and salary accounts, physical and virtual debit cards, wallets, domestic money transfer and Aadhaar-enabled payment systems. 

In Q4 FY25, Jio Payments Bank expanded its network of business correspondents (BC) to 14,000+, an over six-fold increase over FY24, the company claimed.

On the UPI front, JPBL processed 4.08 Mn transactions worth INR 318.20 Cr in the month of March and was the 30th most used UPI app.

JPBL was set up in 2016 as a joint venture between Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) and SBI, with the former holding 77% stake in the digital bank. RIL had received a licence to run a payments bank from the RBI in August 2015. JPBL officially commenced its banking operations in April, 2018, becoming the sixth payments bank to go live in India. 

In 2023, RIL demerged its financial services business, JFS, into a separate entity for a subsequent listing. JFS inherited RIL’s stake in Jio Payments Bank. 

In August 2024, JFS increased its stake in JPBL to 82.17% by purchasing 6.8 Cr equity shares from SBI for INR 68 Cr.

Besides banking, JFS provides lending solutions (Jio Finance Ltd), payments solutions (Jio Payment Solutions Ltd), and insurance services (Jio Insurance Broking Ltd). 

Last month, Jio BlackRock Asset Management received SEBI’s approval to commence operations. Earlier this month, Jio BlackRock Investment Advisors received the regulator’s nod to operate as an investment advisor.