Pankaj's Letter to Editor in ET chat room

Read the entire Press Release.

Press Coverage so far:

Mint, Business Standard, BusinessWire, Net4News, MoneyLife, IndiaInfoLine, AndhraNews, SiliconIndia, VCCircle, PE Hub, Asian Venture Capital Journal, CIOL

Read the official release from the United Nations.

Other coverage:

Asian Scientist,  Scoop, Westender, Energy Alternatives India, Business Innovation Facility

To serve the largest types of transactions faster, it would be good to consider rejiging the screen flow on ATMs in the following manner:

1. On card swipe and authentication (either PIN or fingerprint) the next screen to show current balance in primary account and ask for entering amount for withdrawal.
2. If user wants cash, he enters amounts and presses ‘enter’ on EPP or ‘Yes’ on FDK to get cash.
3. If user just wanted balance enquiry he presses ‘Cancel’ on EPP or ‘Exit’ on FDK.
4. If user wants to do any other transaction, he presses ‘other’ on FDK to proceed to list of other transactions like mini statement, cheque book request, PIN change, etc.

In this fashion, the majority of users are able to finish their transactions in just 3 screens

Views expressed are personal

Success is the biggest motivator, sometimes even bigger than monetary benefits. We have seen so many employees who turn down and dejected after few failures. Even monetary raise or more perks and bigger responsibility fail to motivate them to perform. I always tell these guys that you are the same person with same skills & competencies. The only difference is the level of your self motivation or morale which is affected adversly by these failures. One shot of success in your core area and you would be up & raoring again. In my view the real professional is the person who gets self motivated by every success, big or small and doesn’t need any external motivator.

Not only the professional life, success in your core area affects your personal and family life as well. You are happy, excited and go home with a big smile on face cheering your family members as well. So success spreads happiness.

The biggest mantra of happiness is try your best to succeed in as many tasks as possible, keep your commitments as much as possible and don’t commit anything which you can’t fulfill. This will make you and others around you happy and your overall performance will automatically improve.

Installing Low cost biometric ATMs supporting vernacular language display & voice in every village is going to be the best way to achieve total financial inclusion in real terms. Till now banks were not keen in installing ATMs in rural areas due to three reasons. Very less number of transactions as expected in these areas as majority of people don’t have bank accounts ( and thus miniscule card base), not enough cash in their hands to save in their bank accounts & high cost of setting up an ATM making it unviable. But over last few years the scenario has changed a lot. More than 70 m new NO frill accounts with cards have been opened, thanks to BCs. Central government is disbursing almost 2 lac crores annually as subsidy & other entitlement transfers under various welfare schemes such as MNREGS etc to these account holders mainly in rural & unbanked areas.  And finally very low cost rural ATMs developed indigineously by local companies are now available in market. Apart from very low capex, these ATMs, due to unique innovative technology, work on minimal power and without AC upto 50 degree C reducing the operational cost dramatically. This makes these machines most viable for even 40 transactions per day volume. Due to very low power consumption these machines can run on solar power also with a little extra expenditure making them work without any power at all. Moreover in built biometric authentication option with routine PIN based makes them perfectly useful for illiterate rural masses.

The biggest bank of the country SBI, taking the lead again, has installed around 500 such ATMs in typical remote rural areas in last year or so and the results are an eye opener for all. Many of these ATMs are seeing more than 200 transactions per day ( at par with urban ATM average) consistently and dispensing crores every month. As per experienced shared by many users in villages these ATMs have come as a boon for the local economy as earlier they used to travel more than 50Kms or even more in some cases to withdraw money from their bank accounts due to which the ATM/Debit card given by their respective banks were just a showpiece in their hands with no place to use them.

SBI has shown the way…sure other banks to follow to turn the dream of total financial inclusion a reality.