Reliance Jio now brings banking on mobile: Know benefits of payments bank

Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio Infocomm is leaving no stone unturned to enhance the experience of its users and make lives easier for them therough the use of its services. Known for its disruptive data services and free data plans, Reliance Jio has now forayed into the banking business with a payments bank service, Reserve Bank of India has confirmed.

Jio Payments Bank is a joint venture between Reliance Industries and the country's biggest lender, State Bank of India. While Jio has a 70 per cent in the JV, SBI has the remaining 30 per cent.

Mukesh Ambani-promoted Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) was one of the 11 applicants for setting up payments bank in August 2015. Jio received the licence to start operation in March 2017, according to media reports.

What is a payments bank?

A payments bank is like any traditional bank but operating at a smaller scale. The only difference is that payments banks do not have any credit-providing service. 

New Year disruption plan: Now, Reliance Jio moves to broadband, TV space

After its success in mobile telephony, Reliance Jio is preparing to disrupt the market once again. This time in the fixed broadband and television (TV) space.

The Mukesh Ambani-led company will launch high-speed fibre to the home (FTTH) broadband in more than 30 cities early next year, to offer TV as well as internet to subscribers, it is learnt.

Jio has mapped out a plan to address over 100 million TV households across these cities, including Tier II and III, by ensuring dense fibre presence for last-mile connectivity to homes. In the first phase itself, at least 50 million households will be offered the service, according to sources in the know.

Jio has already spread out over 300,000 kilometres of optic fibre (half of which is through a long-term contract with Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communications).

In fact, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani, in his annual general meeting speech this year, indicated that Jio was on track to offer high-speed broadband services. The infrastructure was in place and it would be the next big monetisation opportunity for the company, he had said.
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Next from Jio 'digital mission' -- connected car app, JioTV, music and more

Breaking news - In this fast-moving age, how about a a car controlled by a mobile app or a TV that can store programmes and movies of the last seven days? All these will soon be possible in India, coming out of Reliance Jios stable as a part of its 'digital lifestyle mission.

Is Realince Jio only about 4G connectivity? Its officials beg to differ. "We want people to adapt to the digital lifestyle and we are working hard towards it," said one official while this correspondent took a tour of the Jio Experience Centre -- often called the birthplace for Jio's digital drive.

From SIM activation, metro tickets to connected cars, Jio is trying to give a digital touch to every aspect of life. The Jio Experience Centre in Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City on the Thane-Belapur road reveals many gadgets and apps to completely digitise lifestyles in the coming days.

Staring with its SIM connection, Jio has made a scanbox to facilitate preliminary documentation. This scanning process (provided to its retailers), has helped reduce activation time from four-five hours to three-four minutes, officials claim.

At present, Jio is experiencing 600,000 lakh activations per day, on an average.

Changing a mobile phone is generally an irritant as transferring contact details, photos and data is often cumbersome, besides the fear of data loss or theft. For this, Jio has a device, SwitchNWalk, to transfer up to 1 GB data in 45 seconds from one device to another without storing any data. It works for both Android and iOS.(Read More)