State Bank of India has adopted a village – Shirki in Pen taluka of Maharashtra – to drive Aadhar-based merchant payment system. This follows the conversion of an SBI colony near Mumbai into a fully cashless colony recently. Under this initiative, the bank volunteers have been meeting the families in Shirki village and have enabled them to open bank accounts and seed their Aadhaar numbers, which is the only pre-requisite for enabling the entire village to become cashless. The merchants in the village have been provided with simple android phones with a USB based fingerprint capture device. The only precondition is that the merchant needs to have a bank account, with an Aadhaar number seeded. The merchant downloads the Aadhaar Pay App and registers with his/her bank using the mobile app in two simple steps. The consumer only need to have a bank account with their Aadhaar number seeded. The interesting aspect of this solution is that the consumer is not expected to have a mobile phone but pays the merchant by selecting the bank name (in the app) where he/she has an account and providing the fingerprint in the biometric device attached to the mobile phone. The transaction is completed instantaneously; the consumer’s account is debited by the value of the goods or service purchased and the merchant’s bank account is duly credited. Speaking at the formal launch of this solution at Shirki village, SBI DMD and CIO Mrutyunjay Mahapatra complimented the SBI and TCS teams for enabling this adoption in such a short time and rolling it across the entire village comprising around 2000 households.
