SBI to launch ‘YONO Bharat’ mobile banking app for Jan Dhan customers

State Bank of India (SBI) is developing YONO Bharat, a specialized mobile banking app aimed at financial inclusion customers, feature phone users, and devices with limited security features. The app may be launched in 6-12 months.

YONO Bharat app will cater to the mobile banking requirements of customers with feature phones and certain categories of devices where the security features are not adequate, Chairman CS Setty said at the BFSI Summit hosted by Business Standard.

He said: Out of our 53 crore customers, we have about 17-18 crore Jan Dhan customers. These customers are quite familiar using the UPI apps. We would like to bring them on a smaller, easy to use (YONO) version, which is a device neutral version to reach out to all of them.

“…I think we can bring 30 crore customers by 2030 on YONO. I think this is something what we would like to do in order to ensure that the mobile banking application does not simply remain mobile application. It becomes an empowerment tool for everyone. So, YONO Bharat will be the latest offering from SBI,” he said.

The aim of app is to expand digital banking reach to bring an estimated 30 crore (300 million) customers onto the YONO ecosystem by 2030, transforming the app into an empowerment tool.

SBI handles over 53 crore (530 million) total depositors, which includes more than 17 crore (170 million) Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) account holders. YONO Bharat is custom-made for these 17 crore financial inclusion customers.

By lowering technical barriers via YONO Bharat, SBI plans to skyrocket its overall active digital user base from the current 11 crore to 30 crore users by 2030. The State Bank of India’s YONO platform has over 10.5 crore (105 million) registered users.

Out of SBI’s 53 crore total bank customers, approximately 13 crore actively use digital channels, with over 10 crore explicitly registered on the YONO ecosystem. The platform handles roughly 1.5 crore to 2 crore logins on peak traffic days, such as national paydays.

YONO app has become the primary portal for onboarding, driving the opening of nearly 70,000 new digital savings accounts every day. Nearly 66% of all new SBI savings accounts are now opened directly through the YONO app.

Following the recent release of YONO 2.0, SBI Chairman CS Setty stated that the bank expects to leverage this technical overhaul to double its active user base to 20 crore (200 million) users. Looking further ahead, the upcoming rollout of YONO Bharat aims to scale that total to 30 crore users by 2030.