State Bank of India (SBI) has decided not to list YONO, the state-owned lender’s integrated digital banking platform.

The country’s largest bank also has no plans to spin off YONO as a subsidiary to unlock value.

“YONO is a distribution platform for us. Some analysts might start asking when are you spinning off your branches. Without branches, the bank does not exist. Similarly, we have no plans for spinning off YONO,” SBI chairman Dinesh Khara said.

Former SBI chairman Rajnish Kumar, during whose tenure YONO was launched, had planned to hive off the digital app as a separate subsidiary so that the legacy bank’s biggest start-up would drive in valuation.

In an interview with Indianbankingnews.com, Kumar had then said, “The plan is to hive off YONO. It is profitable and its valuation will get reflected once it sits outside the bank. Given the valuation start-ups get, YONO can get valued at $40 billion.

Launched in November 2017, YONO has grown to be the digital face of SBI and has over 63.6 million registered users. In FY23, SBI acquired 64% or 78.60 lakh savings accounts digitally through YONO. The digital app has over 11.1 million daily logins and 780,000 daily average transactions made through it.

YONO was initially launched for SBI’s own customers who could conduct all their banking services through the digital platform. It enabled users to also have access to other services such as online shopping, bill payments and ticket bookings. The plan was also to open up YONO for non-SBI customers as well.

For the country’s largest bank, the digital journey was important. YONO (You Only Need One) became a crucial piece of the bank’s growth strategy.

“It was increasingly becoming clear to me that we had to do something remarkably different from the run-of-the-mill apps to catapult SBI as a leader in the digital space as well,” Kumar wrote in his book The Custodian of Trust.

In July 2023, YONO was revamped and any bank customer was allowed to use the app for UPI (United Payments Interface) payments. With the ‘YONO for every Indian’ slogan, SBI said the milestone upgrade further expanded the bank’s commitment to providing inclusive and customer-centric digital banking services to every Indian citizen. 

On taking SBI Mutual Fund public, Khara said that there are no plans to list the asset management business at this stage. “An IPO (initial public offering) of our asset management business is not on the cards as of now. We may consider it, if at all, at a future date,” Khara told analysts after announcing the bank’s June quarter results.

On 15 December 2021, SBI revealed its plan to dilute 6% stake in SBI MF through an IPO and was planning to raise around $1 billion. But in November 2022, Khara said the plan to sell share of the bank's mutual fund subsidiary has been shelved for the time being.