Aircel to tap 10 lakh Tirunelveli migrants with new mobile banking service

Chennai:

In a bid to reach out to the migrant population as well as unbanked population, Aircel, one of the leading telecom players, and ICICI Bank on Monday jointly launched mobile banking service running on Visa’s Mobile managed service.

Addressing a press conference here, Aircel’s head of banking service Geoff King and regional business head K Sankara Narayanan said the service is being rolled out in Tirunelveli and Chennai and caters to India’s unbanked, a majority of whom face hurdles in managing their finances such as reliability of intermediaries, distance to formal banking infrastructure and financial literacy.

“The service will be first available in Tamil Nadu to specifically cater to the needs of large migrant working population from Tirunelveli now living and working in Chennai. Rollout to other parts of the state and rest of the country will happen later this year,” said King.

Narayanan said there are 10 lakh migrants from Tirunelveli in Chennai and especially in T Nagar area. “Through this service we will be targeting them,” he says.

He says the Aircel customer will have to pay the money in one of the 13 retail outlets in the city. Following which the receiving person will get a code and password. The money will be deposited in the bank but if he or she in Tirunelveli wants the money then they have to approach the 50 retail outlets in Tirunelveli. “They have to show the code and password to claim the money,” said Narayanan.

King said the programme is being rolled out in Tirunelveli and Chennai on a trial basis. We are focusing on the areas where the migrant population is large.

He said according to a research a migrant conducts on an average a financial transaction worth Rs 800 a month. Interestingly, Aircel and ICICI will get 1.5 to 3 per cent of every transaction. “This model has been launched in 150 markets worldwide and has been a commercial success in 15 markets. We hope this will be a commercial success here,” said King. Interestingly, the target is to reach out to 800 million unbanked people in India, says King.

Currently, Aircel is developing a retail network. The minimum deposit is Rs 100 and the maximum deposit is Rs 50,000. Annually these transactions should not be above Rs 2 lakh, said Narayanan.

King said on an average there are $ 25 billion worth financial transactions in India annually while it is $60 billion coming into the country from abroad every year.