Business, Economy & Banking Current Affairs MCQs

• Citibank, which is headquartered in the USA, received a license from the IFSC Authority to set up its banking unit at India’s first International Financial Services Centre at GIFT City, Gujarat.
• Citibank will become the first US-based bank to set up a branch in GIFT-IFSC. Citibank will be servicing both Indian as well as its global customer base from this IFSC branch.
• Recently, Deutsche Bank, which is one of the major global banks with presence in over 70 countries, became the first German bank to set up IBU (IFSC Banking Unit).
• Leading Indian and foreign banks such as HSBC, Standard Chartered, Barclays Bank, State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, HDFC Bank, etc are already operating their banking business from GIFT IFSC.

• Capital Float has partnered with Razorpay, to extend its buy now pay later (BNPL) solution ‘Walnut 369’ to all Razorpay-enabled online merchants.
• Customers can sign up while shopping, get approved instantly and pay for purchases over three, six or nine months.
• Through this partnership Capital Float aims to expand to over 1,00,000 partners and serve customers across 100 cities in India.

• Facebook India has launched a new initiative called the “Small Business Loans Initiative” on August 20, 2021.
• This initiative was launched in partnership with online lending platform, Indifi.
• It will extend help to small and medium businesses (SMBs) who advertise on Facebook in order to get quick access to credit with the help of independent lending partners.
• India is the first country where Facebook rolled out this initiative.
• This facility is open to businesses that are registered across 200 towns and cities in India.
• Indifi is the first lending partner with which Facebook has tied up. The initiative was announced by Facebook India at a virtual event “Enabling MSME Growth through Financial Inclusion”.

• Union Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs Nirmala Sitharaman today unveiled the fourth edition of the Public Sector Bank (PSB) Reforms Agenda ‘EASE 4.0’ for 2021-22 – tech-enabled, simplified, and collaborative banking.
• She unveiled the annual report for the PSB Reforms Agenda EASE 3.0 for 2020-21 and participated in the awards ceremony to felicitate best performing banks on EASE 3.0 Banking Reforms Index.
• State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda and Union Bank of India have won the awards for best performing banks for PSB Reforms EASE 3.0 based on the EASE index.
• Indian Bank won the award for the best improvement from the baseline performance.
• SBI, BoB, Union Bank of India, Punjab National Bank and Canara Bank won the top awards in different themes of the PSB Reforms Agenda EASE 3.0.

This deal would enhance HDFC Life’s agency business by 40 per cent and agent base by 30%. Also, it would raise the assets under management of the company to over Rs 2 trillion.

The website showcases more than 2000 crore transactions by consumers on an interactive map of India. PhonePe also launched the Pulse Report, which studies on the evolution of digital payments over the past 5 years with detailed geographical and category-specific trends. As per the report, over 300 million Indians from 19,000 pin codes now use digital payments.