Armed with a war chest of over $1 billion after selling his stakes in Flipkart to Walmart, Sachin Bansal is now eyeing setting up a bank. The financial services sector in India has seen a lot of new entrants in the recent past with the biggies like the Alibaba Group of China and the SoftBank Group of Japan investing in the likes of Paytm.
In the case of Sachin Bansal, a report in Economic Times indicates that he is keen on venturing into a full-fledged bank and has reached out to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on what it entails to open up a new bank. For the record, you need to make a fresh investment of Rs 500 crore and the entrepreneur must possess an experience of 10 years running a business. Bansal has reportedly been consulting with experts on the various possibilities.
The financial services sector in the country has progressed extensively with many players getting into the lending business and bringing in a lot of technology to use for making the assessments of eligibility. Even otherwise, the lending part of the banking business is always considered the easier operation to grow. But to operate a proper banking setup the liabilities side, which is constituted by building deposits, like savings and other deposit accounts is the more difficult one.
Sachin Bansal has floated an entity BAC Acquisitions Pvt Ltd for channelizing the investment he intends to make in different sectors. The verticals he has chosen are quite vast and diverse, as described in the plans he has submitted to the government while incorporating this company. These include data sciences, healthcare, energy, media and entertainment, fast-moving consumer goods, engineering, retail, logistics, food & beverages, infrastructure, construction, machinery, agriculture, automobile, HR, gaming, fiscal advisory and insurance.
His most recent investments include Rs 650 crore in Ola and his prior to that he reportedly invested in electric scooter maker Ather Energy.