New Delhi: India Post Payments Bank (IPPB) will press into
service postmen equipped with smartphones to go door to door and will
open 3,250 customer access points across 650 districts when it launches
operations in March, seeking to cater largely to under-banked rural
areas.
The bank will leverage the 155,000 technologically upgraded post
offices, of which 129,000 are in rural areas, as well as the existing
customer base of India Post, Anant Narayan Nanda, secretary, department
of posts, and chairman of IPPB, said in an interview.
A special dispensation from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will enable
the payments bank to link accounts of existing post office savings bank
customers and let them access both on the same screen and perform
transactions.
According to Nanda, this will give a huge fillip to existing customers. India Post has around 170 million savings bank accounts.
“By December 2018, 2 lakh postmen and gramin dak sewaks carrying
mobile phones will offer doorstep banking to customers predominantly in
rural areas. Eventually, this number will increase to 3.5 lakh,” Nanda
said.
The bank plans to start with 3,250 access points—five each in 650
districts—and scale up the number every month. It will employ 3,000
people—roughly half the staff will be on deputation from state-run banks
and India Post.
The bank is in the process of training postmen to carry out basic
banking facilities such as opening bank accounts and conducting
transactions on the mobile phone. Besides assisting customers, the
postmen will also teach them how to perform transactions on their own.
They will receive monetary incentives for both assisted and eventually
self-service transactions.
Customers will be able to access a range of services including net
banking, National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT), Real-time Gross
Settlement (RTGS) and Immediate Payment Service (IMPS). They will be
able to pay utility bills, invest in mutual funds and buy insurance
products on the app.
The gramin dak sevaks and postmen will be trained by banking
institutions. An internal survey by the department showed that between
70% and 80% of postmen use smartphones for personal use and are active
on social networking sites and should be able to use the app with ease,
Nanda said.
At present, the post office accepts payments of around Rs46,000 crore in
cash every year. With the entire network moving towards accepting
digital payments, a significant portion of this amount could be handled
by the banking network, an indication of the potential available for
business.
IPPB is 100% owned by India Post; it received a payments bank license
from RBI in January 2017 and has begun operations on a pilot basis in
Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.
India has three other operational payment banks—Airtel Payments Bank, Paytm Payments Bank and Fino Payments Bank.
“India Post does have the largest reach in the rural parts of the
country and the idea of financial inclusion through postmen seems very
promising,” said Ashish Aggarwal, a consultant at the National Institute
of Public Finance and Policy. “However, the execution has to be well
done to have mass impact. The postmen need to be well-trained and
equipped as even basic banking involves much more than delivering
courier (packages) and letters,” he added.
source:livemint.
