To give its rural banking business as well as digital payments channel a big push, State Bank of India plans to acquire six lakh fingerprint scanners.
India’s largest bank wants to use the biometric scanners to facilitate various Aadhaar (biometric) based transactions from different channels and applications such as merchant payment.
The devices, which are expected to support live fingerprint detection, will be used by the bank’s registered / nominated users at the field level, the bank said in its tender document.
The procurement of the scanners is part of SBI’s plan to facilitate cashless merchant payments and reach out to financial inclusion customers, who have opened basic savings bank accounts under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY), by boosting the development of ‘Acceptance Touch Points’ in physical and digital forms.
Under the PMJDY, which was launched in August 2015, SBI opened 85.70 million accounts and issued 58.60 million RuPay debit cards to eligible customers as of March 31, 2017. To service its large base of customers, the bank is seeking to expand its business correspondent (BC) network.
In addition to the traditional domestic branch network of 24,000 branches, SBI has engaged BCs at over 50,000 service points as of March 31, 2017.
BCs conduct banking business such as collecting small-value deposits, receiving and delivering small-value remittances, disbursing small-value credit, recovering principal/ collecting interest, and selling third-party products as agents of banks at places other than the bank premises. The value of transactions handled by the SBI through its BCs increased from ₹38,973 crore in fiscal 2015 to ₹58,217 crore in fiscal 2016, and to ₹73,820 crore in fiscal 2017.