Shops turn petty ATMs for State Bank customers

Chennai: Next time when you are in need of some quick petty cash, just walk into any of the shop that accepts credit card payments.  If you are a customer of SBI or its associate banks, you can use the machine to withdraw cash up to Rs 1,000 from your savings account using your debit or credit card.

In line with RBI’s proposition to allow cash withdrawals through prepaid cards issued by banks from point of sale terminals, India’s biggest lender has come up with the Cash@POS facility across the country from last week that lets merchant shops act as ATM counters.

This helps customers to withdraw about Rs 100 to Rs 1,000 per debit card per day at any of these point of sale (PoS).

“Though the facility will be made applicable to all debit cards issued in India, to start with, we are rolling out the facility with SBI group debit cards,” said P.V. Rajamani, AGM, merchant acquiring business, of the bank.

This includes customers of State Bank of Travancore, State Bank of Bikaner & Jaipur, State Bank of Hyderabad, State Bank of Patiala and State Bank of Mysore.

Though RBI had permitted cash withdrawals at PoS terminals through debit cards way back in 2009, the service had not taken off owing to various reasons including lack of clarity on processing fee structures. For now, a convenience fee of one per cent of the transaction amount will be levied on the cardholder which can be anything in the range of Rs 7.50 to Rs 10.

Merchants will be paid an incentive of Rs 5 for every successful transaction along with the cash paid to customers.
“SBI, which already has over one lakh POS terminals, will deploy an additional 40,000 more exclusive terminals before the end of this fiscal year,” said Rajamani. “In Tamil Nadu alone, there will be 15,000 POS terminals during the same time,” he added.

As on June-end SBI, had over 20 crore customers and had issued 14 crore debit cards and accounted for 29 per cent of India’s total 1,23,705 ATMs.