PayMate, IFMR to offer mobile payment soln

DELHI, INDIA: Paymate, a mobile payments company, and IFMR Rural Finance, on Thursday announced a tie-up to launch multiple financial inclusion projects through Kshetriya Gramin Financial Services (KGFS) entities.

As a part of this initiative, Paymate unveiled a mobile phone based person-to-person money transfer initiative in the Delhi to Uttarakhand corridor as well as piloted a micro-loan repayments in villages in Ganjam, Orissa, said a press release.

Dhanei KGFS offers a suite of financial services to its customers and loans have a major share of the portfolio. As customers live in the remote rural location of Ganjam district, in a move to increase the convenience of repayment, Dhanei KGFS with PayMate as a technology partner, has initiated a pilot project aimed to simplify the process of loan repayments, enabling repayments at convenient village locations.

Using a combination of a float model and mobile equipped agents, registered agents of Dhanei KGFS located at remote villages are able to visit the customer to collect payment in cash while using a mobile phone and register the payment against the customer’s unique account ID via SMS.

The solution comes equipped with a real time dynamic MIS for Dhanei KGFS to check all the payments and filter it by agent, customer, date and transaction and even download it for future reference.

Ajay Adiseshann, MD and founder, PayMate, said, “Although reforms in the banking sector have been on an upswing, around 60 per cent of the country’s population does not have access to a bank account or even the necessary documents to help secure basic finance. This has severely impacted the cost of development of the lowest strata of society.

On the other hand, he said, there has been an exponential growth in mobile penetration with close to 200 million users in rural areas, making it a potent tool to create a financial ecosystem for the under and unbanked masses. These initiatives are an extension of Paymate's belief in the power of mobile telephony to drive financial inclusion..

Over a year ago, PayMate, along with Tata Indicom and Corporation Bank, launched its person to person money transfer service - Green.