Situation

Inclusive growth demands the extension of financial services to every far flung corner of this vast and diverse country. With the renewed focus of the Reserve Bank of India and the Ministry of Finance on providing banking services to the un-banked population, banks and financial institutions have necessarily had to foray into the mass rural and urban market. Banks are looking to rapidly diversify their portfolios and create services to tap the large and relatively untapped rural markets in order to ensure profitability and to provide better returns to their shareholders.

However, this rural credit delivery has been a major challenge for the banking sector. Major initiatives undertaken over the years have not met with the desired level of success thanks to several factors.

The immediate need is to address the two of the main problem areas that of reach and efficiency in order to step up the flow of credit to agricultural and other rural activities in India and thereby improve rural productivity and economic welfare.

However, attempting to deliver banking services through the expansion of the traditional network of brick and mortar bank branches is a task which is not only immense but also prohibitive in terms of costs and time consumption.

An expedient and cost effective solution to achieve such a spread would be the use of a click and mortar *branch-plus* network utilizing the infrastructure and manpower in existing branches and augmenting their reach using partners in the field. These partners could be Micro Finance Organizations, Business Correspondents and NGOs whose agents would be technologically equipped to provide the complete suite of banking services at the doorstep of rural and semi urban clients.

Solution

atyati’s GANASEVA is an end-to-end mobility based technology platform catered to deliver the complete suite of banking services to the rural population.

The solution creates a comprehensive, fully automated credit delivery system for rural and semi-urban banking. It provides a common infrastructure for data collection and information management. This solution is built on the following core components

• Offline Transaction Origination – Transactions like customer acquisition, product origination (loan, deposits, insurance, etc.) and customer servicing can be done offline.
• Offline Transaction Posting – Customer transactions can be posted using an offline smartcard framework.
• Back-office Process Framework – Flexible business processes incorporating human workflow makes for a robust back end
• Back-office Transaction Processing – Interest accruals, repayments and other such capabilities are built into the back end
• Offline Smartcard based Transaction Capabilities – Capabilities that ensure effective authentication and efficiency of transactions
• Analytical Engine – Provides for customer analytics, credit risk analytics, credit scoring engine.

The key features of the atyati solution are:

• Multilingual: As the application needs to be used by rural users, regional language support is ensured
• Synchronization with Server: The product provides the capability to sync the laptop/PDA with the server
• Ability to Work in low/no bandwidth: The ability to work offline is required, as the data may need to be collected at a particular remote location and subsequently synchronized with the central database when and where network access is available
• Audit trail: The audit trail for any transaction will be stored in the database leaving no room for corruption or errors
• Security: Security will be the key; and checks and balances built to remove any misuse possible