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It seems, after 10 long years, Mukesh Ambani has a plan for Jio Payments Bank 🙏🙏 Let me explain all that has happened so far, right from the start, and why I say something is brewing! .. You see, Reliance received the license to run a payments bank in August 2015. - It roped in the State Bank of India (SBI) as a co-investor, and the equity share was split 70:30 - And 13 months later, the duo incorporated the payments bank and started building a team (scaled to 250+ people by 2017) But, none of that translated into any big business! .. The problem? Even though bank started getting people to open accounts in 2018, for another 4yrs, no consumer-facing products were built to be offered to the ones opening an account. All of this was probably because the group was utterly focused on the telecom and retail businesses, driving the payments bank CEO Srikrishnan Harihara Sarma to just quit in 2021. However, after 2021, when those two businesses had scaled to a massive size, it had two new industries that it wanted to develop. 1> End-to-end generation of renewable energy and green hydrogen 2> A financial services empire .. This is why we saw Reliance create Jio Financial Services (JFS) under the leadership of the reputed KV Kamath Ji. Reliance transferred its ownership of the payments bank to JFS. And, in August 2024 (7 months ago), JFS invested Rs 68cr into the payments bank unit to increase stake from 70% to ~83%. - And since then it has also received a mutual funds distribution licence from AMFI, which allows it to upsell mutual funds to its account holders. This basically paves the way for it to become a distributor of the parent company’s mutual fund joint venture with BlackRock, which recently got an in-principle nod to launch operations - Parallely, as JFS scales its network of merchant POS devices, all that is also being supported by the payments bank of the group. This is in line with how Paytm used to power its POS devices from the support of its now-defunct payments bank in the background .. After this, the Ambani clan went the whole hog, moving to buy out SBI from the payments bank a few days back. Thus, after nine long years, there are some serious moves. It could be worth watching if the movement continues for another six months. Especially so because it comes at a time when Airtel, which also operates a payments bank, has scaled that unit beautifully while keeping it profitable. Anyhow, did you know all of this?