SBI To Establish Project Finance Unit For AI, Ecommerce, Fintech

The State Bank of India (SBI) is setting up a new unit to provide project financing solutions for new-age industries such as artificial intelligence (AI), ecommerce, and fintech. 

The public sector bank is looking to hire “specialised professionals” for the new unit, which is expected to be set up in a year, Ashwini Kumar Tewari, managing director of corporate banking and subsidiaries at SBI, told Bloomberg.

The unit, to be named the ‘Centre of Excellence for Project Financing’, will also offer insights to other financial institutions, Tewari said. The bank is also planning to appoint an external consultant for the same. 

The development comes at a time when rising internet penetration and improvement in access to smartphones over the last decade or so have spurred the growth of new-age tech sectors like ecommerce and fintech. India is currently home to over 820 Mn internet users and this number is expected to surge to 1.2 Bn by 2030.

Besides, with generative AI taking the world by the storm, the adoption of the technology is also growing exponentially in the country. As a result, a number of companies, domestic as well as global, are setting up data centres in India.

OpenAI is said to have begun discussions to set up data centres in India, while the likes of AWS and Blackstone have also committed investments of billions of dollars to establish data centres. 

The number of new-age tech companies and startups are also on the rise in the country. This was also reflected in the recent rejig of indices by NSE.

As such, with the rising prominence of new-age tech sectors in the country’s economy, they have emerged as a key focus area for financial institutions. SBI’s decision to set up a new unit seems to be taken with an eye on making the most of these changes in the country’s economy by providing dedicated and swift solutions to these new-age sectors.