DBS Bank India has partnered with Stellapps, a leading dairy-tech startup, as its banking partner to promote digitisation amongst small dairies across India. The partnership intends to indirectly benefit 20,000 dairy farmers at present and around over 100,000 in the near future.
India is the largest milk producer globally, with 188 million MT production in 2019-20, and approximately 70 million farmers are directly involved in dairying. Digitisation of the dairy value chain is expected to improve productivity and quality of milk, transparency and traceability in the supply chain, and improve incomes and financial inclusion amongst dairy farmers.
Stellapps, through its IoT-based solutions and digital data, offers cloud-based grading of milk, which brings in transparency for the farmers in respect of the quantity and quality of milk supplied and the income derived from it. Stellapps’ digital milk procurement system currently aids 250 dairy processors, touches over 2.8 million dairy farmers, and provides digital data on over 13 million litres of milk per day. Given the investments involved, a significant number of the dairies are not keen to deploy a digital structure. Hence, they opt to lease Stellapps’ digital network.
You may also like to read: Airtel Business and IBM deploy hybrid cloud solution to benefit 500,000 milk farmers
As a partner to Stellapps, DBS will digitally help organise the highly fragmented dairy sector. Stellapps Digital Network and DBS Bank will provide dairy farmers with access to funds required for digitisation.
Highlighting the partnership, Divyesh Dalal, Head- Global Transaction Services, DBS Bank India said, “Our focus is to develop tech-enabled solutions that directly impact efficiency across the supply chain. Our partnership with Stellapps has allowed us to work on an enabling solution that will benefit the dairies and farmers. The collaborative effort has resulted in a solution that drives higher yield, increased efficiency, and overall visibility across intermediaries. We believe this solution will benefit the larger ecosystem and help build parallels across the agriculture value chain.”
You may also like to read: Stellapps enters into a 5-year partnership with Nutreco for improving animal nutrition
Elaborating the collaboration, Rahul Mallick, CEO-FinTech & VAS, Stellapps, said, “At Stellapps, we aspire to simplify the lives of dairy farmers by leveraging technology and digitalisation to help them improve their incomes and get access to tailor-made ‘sachet’ sized financial products and services. The banking partnership with DBS Bank will go a long way in solving this hurdle and will help onboard more dairy companies onto our platform. DBS was chosen due to its digitisation prowess and physical reach across India. We are confident that this partnership will start to show results in the immediate term and will be a significant step in our business journey as well.”
