New Delhi, Feb 20 (IANS): Lending major State Bank of India's subsidiary SBI Payments on Saturday said it plans to deploy low-cost acceptance infrastructure 'to expand the digitisation of merchant payments' in the country.

Accordingly, the company is launching 'YONO Merchant App'.

"Aiming to enable millions of merchants through mobile led technology to accept digital payments, SBI plans to deploy low-cost acceptance infrastructure across India over the next two years targeting 20 million potential merchants across India in retail and enterprise segment," it said in a statement.

The launch, company said, is in line with RBI's recent announcement of creating a Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) to encourage acquirers to deploy Point of Sale (PoS) infrastructure (both physical and digital) in lesser penetrated areas of the country.

"Merchants will now be able to turn their NFC enabled Android smartphones into payment acceptance devices through a simple mobile app."

According to the statement, SBI partnered with Visa, on the 'Tap to Phone' feature, which aims to give the necessary boost to scale up acceptance infrastructure across the country.

"While the State Bank of India has focused on providing innovative, best-in-class banking services and inclusion of new-to-digital merchants and customers, Visa continues to simplify payments with products like tokenisation."

"With India's smartphone base expected to reach 820 million in the next two years, both SBI and Visa firmly believe there is a tremendous opportunity to augment them as payment acceptance devices."

Following the deployment, the company said merchants will also be able to access details of transactions, generate reports, upload transactions for processing etc. through SBI's mobile application besides accepting payments on their mobile device.