Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages, SBI tie-up for digital solution

Mumbai:  Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages, the bottling arm of Coca-Cola in India, today tied up with the country's largest lender State Bank of India to enable its over 2.6 million retailers and 5000 distributors to conduct business transactions digitally.

The bank will initiate the retailers in the digitisation process with its digital payment options like Buddy P2P, Buddy Merchant, App, SBI Pay.

"We would train the retailers not only in our product but also about the loans that they could possible access. I am sure we would be able to get all of these people who are today dealing in cash to the digital payment," SBI Chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya told reporters here.

She said loans to the retailers would be given based on their actual turnover. Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Bottling Investments Group regional director for South Asia T Krishnakumar said, "While all of our payment to suppliers and more than 90 per cent of our collections from our partners are digitised, we propose to extend this facility to every retailer in the marketplace."

He said the digital payment solutions in business transactions will help further strengthen the company's retail chain ecosystem covering over 2.6 million retailers and 5,000 distributors and will substantially reduce the dependence on cash. The process will be rolled out from February 1 onwards in a phased manner, Krishnakumar added.