Micro ATM: A Doorstep Banking System

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Some obstacles
The team faced its share of difficuties while creating such an innovative solution.

Vaibhav Peshney, regional finacial inclusion leader, YES Bank, shares some of the challenges, “The major challenge was to develop the system from a normal collection device to a mobile banking product. Customisation of the back-end servers and the front-end interface was a major task. Even for some of us who had been working in this sector for a considerable number of years, understanding the exact need of the target customer was again a challenge. In fact, these challenges only pushed us to think frugal and come up with our very own Frugal Innovation for Financial Inclusion (FI4FI) programme; YES Sahaj is one such innovation under this initiative.”

Rupesh Kumar, financialinclusion leader, adds, “For the initial workable collection module, it took only four months time for a basic product as cable collection device to be in place. The credit goes to both the teams for their dedicated efforts. We had to customise the product for banking requirements and standards and then train their back-end team to deal with the banking standards. After that, it has been continuous research and development which has helped in adding new features from time to time.”

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Future expansion plans
Financial inclusion is an evolving sector. Customising the product to the needs of the customers is a learning experience for all the players in this field. Amulya Bisht, associate, cites the example of YES Sahaj micro ATM, “YES Bank itself has gone through many phases of development to come out from a mere field collection deviceto a withdrawal and deposit platform and now to a complete doorstep micro-ATM-cum-teller. In coming days, many new features, including a more secure transaction mode, along with product customisation to address other standard banking products like over- draft facility, will be added to it.”

The standalone services for micro ATM will be charged on a per-transaction basis. This amount will be very small as compared to the wage loss incurred by customers in visiting the banking premises.

The author is a tech correspondent at EFY Bengaluru