State Bank of India (SBI) is going slow on its plans to divest its stake in digital platform Yono, which has around 28.5 million registered users.

This was disclosed by SBI chairman Dinesh Kumar Khara to Bloomberg Television in an interview on Monday.

Pointing out that the country’s largest bank will at some stage consider such a divestment, he said the lender is not in a tearing hurry to take this step.

In October, Rajnish Kumar, the former chairman of SBI, had said that it is looking to hive off the integrated digital and lifestyle platform into a separate subsidiary.

He had then disclosed that SBI was in discussions with all its partners to hive it off as a separate subsidiary.

Kumar had said that after Yono becomes an independent entity, SBI could even become one among its users even as he admitted that discussions in this regard were at a preliminary stage and that a valuation exercise for the entity was pending.

Earlier, Kumar had said that Yono’s valuation could be around $40 billion.

Launched three years ago, the app, which has crossed more than 65 million downloads, sees more than 5.5 million logins per day along with over 4,000 daily disbursals of personal loans and 16,000 Yono Krishi Agri Gold loans.

Use of the app has gone up amid the pandemic. While declaring the second quarter numbers, SBI had said that digital transactions now form 65 per cent of the total transactions. The platform has also been successful so far in generating a loan portfolio of Rs 25,000 crore and liabilities portfolio of Rs 60,000 crore. Its estimated contribution to the profit before tax of SBI is put at Rs 1,000 crore for the current fiscal.

SBI has also been looking to establish a digital payments entity under the New Umbrella Entity (NUE) framework for retail payments. In August this year, the RBI had released a framework for authorisation of a pan-India umbrella entity for retail payments.

The last date for submitting the application to the banking regulator is February 26, 2021.