Calcutta, Feb. 23: Airtel Payments Bank is exploring the possibility of selling financial products of NBFCs, including insurance, mutual funds as well as offering loans, for a fee to its customers.

Payments banks are not allowed to undertake lending activities under RBI guidelines. But a partnership with a third-party finance company could allow these entities to offer loans on behalf of the NBFC and earn a fee-based income.

"Over the next one year, we would explore whether third party financial products can be added," said Shashi Arora, managing director and CEO of Airtel Payments Bank.

Starting operations last month, the payments bank has opened 1.5 lakh accounts in Bengal across a retail network of 21,000 Airtel stores. Nationally, the bank is operating a network of 250,000 stores. The bank plans to scale up the network to 600,000 banking points and has committed itself an investment of Rs 3,000 crore across its national operations.

It is offering an interest rate of 7.25 per cent on deposits of savings bank along with a personal accident insurance of Rs 1 lakh with every savings account.

With 25 per cent of the access points mandated to come up in the rural areas, the bank has adopted a strategy to enable 5,000 villages in India to become cashless. Already 100 villages in Bengal is part of this initiative, Arora said.

Among other services, the bank has an app for transactions, offers a debit card in a partnership with Mastercard and provides USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) based banking services.

The bank has cash withdrawal charges from accounts citing the need to promote digital payments. Such charges vary depending upon the withdrawal (from Rs 1 to up to 0.65 per cent of withdrawal amount).