IndiaPost is India’s postal service, but it recently received permission to act as a payments bank, allowing individuals to deposit money at a low-interest rate. As the first government-backed agency to offer this service, IndiaPost is seeking to enable peer-to-peer payments (P2P) based entirely on the participants’ Aadhaar numbers, regardless of whether they have accounts open at traditional banks.
The effort echoes the Unique Identity Authority of India’s ‘Aadhaar Pay’ project, which would allow individuals to make purchases via biometric scan on a merchant’s mobile POS app. Because their Aadhaar profiles include fingerprint and iris data, the system would immediately identify them, and then debit their bank accounts accordingly.
IndiaPost Payments Bank is aiming to begin operations in September 2017.
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