In a bid to promote the usage of digital payments, public lender State Bank of India (SBI) has planned to acquire six lakh fingerprint scanners.
Country’s largest bank has shown its willingness to use the biometric scanners to enable various Aadhaar (biometric) based transactions from several channels and applications such as merchant payment.
“The devices, which are likely to support live fingerprint detection, will be used by the bank’s registered / nominated users at the field level,” said the bank.
The installation of the scanners is part of SBI’s plan to promote cashless merchant payments and reach out to financial inclusion customers, who have opened their basic savings bank accounts under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY), by boosting the development of ‘Acceptance Touch Points’ in physical and digital forms.
Under the PMJDY, which was launched in August 2015, SBI has opened 85.70 million accounts and issued 58.60 million RuPay debit cards to the eligible customers as of March 31, 2017. In order to expand its large base of customers, the bank is planning to expand its business correspondent (BC) network.
In addition to this traditional domestic branch network of 24,000 branches, SBI has engaged BCs at more than 50,000 service points as of March 31, 2017.
BCs are recruited to conduct banking business such as collecting small-value deposits, receiving and delivering small-value remittances, disbursing small-value credit, recovering principal/ collecting interest, and selling third-party products as agents of banks at places other than the bank premises.
The value of transactions handled by the SBI via BCs reported an increase from Rs 38,973 crore in fiscal 2015 to Rs 58,217 crore in fiscal 2016, and to Rs 73,820 crore in fiscal 2017.
