Yes Bank has signed up with 10 ‘smart cities’

Yes Bank is collaborating with 10 ‘smart cities’ for use of its Yes Scale Smart Cities accelerator to tackle the challenges of urban development. The accelerator is set to be launched this week.The bank is also bringing private companies on the platform and will look at supporting startups that can provide solutions to the challenges provided by the administration in the smart cities.

“This is a significant step towards creating ‘collaboration-as-a-service’ economy and re-looking at urbanisation as an opportunity, not a problem,” said Rana Kapoor, managing director of Yes Bank. “Yes Bank’s cross industry collaboration through Yes Scale Smart City accelerator will empower these cities with innovative solutions to seamlessly connect people, processes and devices and enable administrators to respond faster to citizen’s needs, while also creating new revenue sources.” Among the cities that have tied up with the bank are Nasik, Aurangabad, Warangal, Puducherry, Surat and Chandigarh. Private players like Dell EMC, Bosch, AWS and Google have come on board for the project.

The private firms will provide tech support and could be potential customers as well for these solutions developed by the startups. Amit Shah, head- corporate strategy and fintech at Yes Bank told ET that this is an extension of the core banking services they provide to their customers. “We realised after launching our fintech accelerator that not all the solutions could be used by us, but they would add value to other customers,” he said.

Yes Bank will provide a grant of up to ₹20 lakh for each startup from its CSR fund to support their proof of concept. “We are running five parallel accelerators — smart city, cleantech, agritech, edutech and lifesciences tech — and will support between three to 10 startups for each of these. The smart cities have provided a set of challenges for the startups to solve, from traffic management to pollution and waste management,” he said.