Govt looks to extend mobile banking to all types of phones: Arun Jaitley

New Delhi: The government is looking to expand mobile banking to less advanced cellphones, finance minister Arun Jaitley said on Thursday, as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government pushes ahead with its ambitious plan to ensure every Indian household has access to banks.

Currently, mobile banking is limited to smartphones—phones that have computer like functions on their phones.

“We are making efforts to see if mobile banking can be expanded to all kinds of phones,” Jaitley said at a press briefing after meeting chiefs of public sector banks.

The government plans to use a mix of small branches, kiosks, ATMs (automated teller machines), business correspondents and mobile banking to ensure better and faster access to banking services for the rural and urban population.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is also in touch with various entrepreneurs to look for innovative technologies that can enable mobile banking to be used on all types of phones.

To be sure, bankers admit that this will be a difficult task. “Many rural areas still do not have Internet connectivity. In this kind of a scenario, it is a challenge to spread mobile banking coverage,” said the chief of a state-run bank who attended the meeting. He did not want to be identified.

According to Census 2011, 59% of the 246.7 million households across India have access to banking services—54% of the 167.8 million rural households and 67% of the 78.9 million urban households.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to announce the Sampoorn Vittiyea Samaveshan (comprehensive financial inclusion plan) on 15 August along with a roll-out road map. The financial inclusion plan will look to provide universal access to banking facilities with a basic bank account with an overdraft facility of ₹ 5,000 and a RuPay-enabled debit and ATM card with an inbuilt accident insurance cover of ₹ 1 lakh. RuPay is a debit card payment network launched by the government in 2012. The government may have to open anywhere between 75 million and 150 million accounts, depending on how many accounts each household gets.

It is a good move as the unbanked population may not have access to larger devices like laptops and tablets, according to Aman Bhargava, director, financial services advisory, Grant Thornton India LLP, a consultancy.

“Having a robust and reliable technological framework in a cost-effective sustainable manner will be the main challenge in the road ahead,” Bhargava said. It will have also have to address issues of limited or unreliable connectivity, he added.

Jaitley said the government is trying to launch the mission as soon as possible and hopes to make a considerable headway in the next two years.

“It is important to incentivize people to open bank accounts. Transfers under direct benefit transfer scheme can also help,” the finance minister said. He added that the scheme has many facets as compared to the earlier programme piloted by the Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. “The unit of contact is not the village but a household now, which makes it much more ambitious,” he said.

The government is also looking into the concerns raised by banks about non-payment of money for every transaction under the direct benefits transfer (DBT) scheme. Though banks were promised a fee of 1% for every DBT transaction, many government departments that run welfare schemes have not released the payments. “The finance ministry is looking into this. To some extent, even banks did not have a comprehensive list of all the payments that they had made. We will ensure that banks get their dues,” said a finance ministry official who did not want to be identified.

The government is also considering increasing the fee for banks to 2% on every transaction from 1% at present to make it more lucrative for banks to open bank accounts and transfer funds from the government to beneficiary accounts.