India, Sept. 12 -- State Bank of India (SBI) is developing a solution to use UPI data as a proxy to assess a small business entity's creditworthiness in the absence of GST registration, a top official said on Friday.

The country's largest lender is confident of providing end-to-end digital loans within a day for such borrowers, its Managing Director Ashwini Kumar Tewari said here, adding that this will help assuage concerns about such businesses being left outside formal finance.

"UPI (Unified Payments Interface) can substitute GST (goods and services tax) if regular sales are happening. We are developing a UPI solution (for businesses) without GST, and we will use that (UPI transactions) as a proxy for sales," Tewari said.

The bank ha...