Nandan Nilekani, Chairman of UIDAI, today introduced Aadhar E-KYC (Electronic- Know Your Customer) instant prepaid accounts. A pilot for this will be launched in Delhi, next week.
The Aadhaar ecosystem will power E-KYC (Electronic- Know Your Customer), which will utilise the E-KYC APIs, to allow citizens to avail different services without carrying any physical identification proof.
The UIDAI has partnered with 20 banks, and has also tied-up with the NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) and Visa for payments powered by E-KYC. It can be deployed for customer verification for mobile connections, bank accounts, insurance, LPG connections, state government services, train travel and any service where verification is required. The ecosystem now offers 35 authenticating devices.
Speaking at a digital conference held by Medianama, about the possible applications of these instant accounts, Nilekani said that e-commerce merchants would be able to issue a co-branded bank issued prepaid card with their own branding, and the card can be activated at the time of the check-out using an OTP based authentication, and that an Aadhaar linked prepaid card could be shipped to the customer with the delivery.
The same can be done at physical retailers - Citizens will be able to activate instant accounts with E-KYC, save money into the account, withdraw money, and send money to anyone with an Aadhaar number.
The Aadhar authentication API, will be free until 2013, and priced as a public good later. It allows demographic verification, including name, address, PIN code among others via agent based fingerprint or iris authentication and OTP based self service authentication.
He informed that the UIDAI has already done several thousand authentications. To conduct an E-KYC check, an E-KYC request, along with Aadhaar number and authentication is sent as an input and the name, address, date of birth, gender, and photograph, is received by the agency. He said that the infrastructure supports millions of daily requests. The data is only sent with the customer's consent.