SBI Cards and Payment Services gets regulator Sebi's nod to float IPO

SBI Cards and Payment Services, the credit card unit of the country's largest lender State Bank of India (SBI), has received markets regulator Sebi's go ahead to float an initial public offering.

The company, which had filed draft IPO papers in November, obtained "observations" from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) on February 11 latest update with the regulator showed.

Sebi's observations are necessary for any company to launch public issues including initial public offer, follow-on public offer and rights issue.

As per the draft papers, SBI Cards will offer up to 130,526,798 equity shares through offer for sale route. This will include up to 37,293,371 share sale by SBI and up to 93,233,427 shares on offer by Carlyle Group. In addition, the company will also issue fresh equity shares of Rs 500 crore.

SBI holds 76 per cent in SBI Cards and rest of the stake is held by Carlyle Group.

According to market sources, the IPO size could be estimated at more than Rs 6,000 crore.

SBI Cards is the second-largest credit card issuer in India with an 18 per cent market share.

Kotak Mahindra Capital, Axis Capital, DSP Merryl Lynch, Nomura Financial Advisory, HSBC Securities and SBI Capital Markets are the book-running lead managers of the issue.

Earlier in December, SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar had said the SBI Cards IPO would be launched in the coming months.

Apart from SBI Cards, Mukesh Trends Lifestyle has also received Sebi's go ahead on February 14 to launch its IPO.

The Ahmedabad-based company's IPO consists an issue of up to 1 crore equity shares of face value of Rs 10 each and according to market sources, the IPO issue size will be approximately between Rs 70 and 90 crore.