More than 70 % of India's population lives in the rural area. A sizeable percentage of this population falls in the unorganized sector with lack of basic financial services. One of the key agendas of various NGOs working in the rural areas is to support livelihood programs through the extension of credit to this sector using a Self Help Group (SHG) type model.

Challenges

For technologies to support these NGOs in their activities, we need to address several areas of concern:

• A basic lack of infrastructure
• Rampant fraud due to lack of transparency and effective reporting
• Absence of technological flexibility in existing solutions to support financial products customized to suit the unique requirements in the rural sector
• Absence of seamless information flow from these service providers in the field to the donor financial institutions at the back end

GANASEVA has several key differentiating features which promise to address these challenges:

• It is suited to cater to different types of lending models prevalent in the micro finance world
  • One model followed is where the MFI borrows money from the bank and uses it for lending.
  • In an alternate model, the bank monitors the entire account and uses the MFI as an originating and servicing agency.
  • In some cases, it could be a mix of both, wherein the bank manages the savings / deposit accounts and credit is handled by the MFI through funding.

GANASEVA can work as a standalone solution which allows agents belonging to such NGOs to work offline (without any connection to the central server). They can travel to remote locations and using either a Laptop/PDA/Mobile Phone can input details of the applicant, originate an account, service existing accounts and create both Self Help Groups (SHG) and Joint Liability Groups (JLG).

The Biometric identification details can also be captured offline which can later be used for Biometric Authentication for customer transactions. Customers can also be authenticated using Smart Cards.

The agent can then synchronize from the standalone device to the central server where the transactions go through an approval process. The workflow component enables a multi step, decision based transaction flow. The approval can happen either within the NGO, MFI or the bank depending on the model setup.

GANASEVA supports a breadth of financial products for lending, savings, deposits and insurance. It supports features specifically in-tune with the requirements of the rural sector. Customer information that can be captured is exhaustive and comprises many rural specific features. Loans can be created with flexible moratoriums to handle seasonal vagaries. Both individual accounts / group accounts can be created and monitored to cater to SHG/ JLG type lending.