ICICI Bank has announced an association with Alibaba.com to provide easier trade finance to India-based sellers on the portal. Indian micro, small and medium entrepreneurs (MSME) who are members of Alibaba.com will also get access to ICICI Bank’s other banking facilities such as cash management, foreign exchange, bank guarantees and cross-border remittances.

ICICI bank has become the first Indian bank to be collaborated with Alibaba.com for their online trade facilitation centre. ICICI Bank’s announcement come within a month of State Bank of India’s move to finance MSME sellers attached with Snapdeal’s online market place. Apart from this, SBI had also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with  Amazon to develop a payment solution for customers and sellers.

Now Banks are exploring this segment with e-commerce space growing thick and fast to meet the aspirations of the next generation customers and small businesses. As per the report, e-commerce market in India will touch $22 billion by the end of 2015. With this in view, banks are clearly seeing lending to SMEs in the online space as a growing opportunity.

Tidbits

• ICICI Bank is headquartered in Vadodara, Gujarat,India.
• Alibaba Group Holding Limited is e-commerce company based in China. It provides consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer and business-to-business sales services via web portals.
• The group began in 1999 when Jack Ma founded the website Alibaba.com.
• On 19 September 2014, Alibaba’s shares (BABA) began trading on the NYSE.