IDFC Bank has started offering cashless transactions in Hyderabad’s retail vegetable market. The users will be making use of the bank’s interoperable Aadhaar-based micro-ATM. The Telengana government has suggested to the bank that it introduce such a service to help the vegetable vendors and customers facing shortage of cash. Using the facility, they do not have to face the hassles of dealing with cash or currency of various denominations. The initiative was inaugurated at the Kukkatpally mandi by the state’s minister of irrigation and marketing Harish Rao. Visitors to the market were given tokens against electronic payments made, using the bank’s micro-ATM and its Aadhaar-based biometric authentication. The micro-ATM functions like a ‘bank-in-a-box’ and can be used by customers of all banks. The tokens came in various small denominations, which were used by visitors to make purchases at the market. At the end of the day, the traders and sellers surrendered the tokens collected at the IDFC Bank’s mandi micro-ATM counter and an amount equivalent to the tokens was deposited by the bank into the vendors’ bank accounts, using Aadhaar authentication.
