The new app expected to minimise the role of plastic cards and the point of sale machines once believed to be essential for a less cash society.
The app would eliminate the fee payments for service providers like card companies such as Mastercard or Visa, which has been a stumbling block in merchants switching to digital payments making it affordable to even merchants in remote villages.
Merchants need to download the Aadhaar cashless merchant app on their smartphones connected to a biometric reader. The customer will then feed his or her Aadhar number into the app, select the bank through which the transaction will take place, and the biometric scan will work as a password for the transaction to be authenticated.
According to UIDAI CEO Ajay Bhushan Pandey, the aim is to link all Aadhaar numbers with bank accounts by March, 2017.
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