Now, an Infosys `Nano` for financial inclusion

Finacle has 65 per cent of the core banking solutions business in the country. Last year, it clocked a global turnover of $150 million in 60 countries.

"The solution is there and we are talking to banks, hardware people and enablers to identify launch customers, and can go public with the whole thing by the year-end," indicated Haragopal Mangipudi, vice-president and business head of Finacle.

The product will enable banks to deliver basic banking services to very poor people across the country at affordable costs. By conceptualising an innovative product, which incorporates best global practices, Infosys could end up creating a Nano in mass banking.

As Mangipudi explained, the product has been developed by defining what is needed and then working out what is feasible. The cardinal aim has been to develop a technology which is robust, flexible and with very wide reach. To use the solution banks should not have to make daunting up-front capital investment and need pay on a per-use or per-transaction basis.

Finacle first decided that for the product to have mass application it has to be bank agnostic, usable by any bank and not limited to only those hosting Finacle solutions. Also, it has to be multi-correspondent enabled, that is usable by a range of self-help groups and NGOs which typically take financial services to the doorstep of the very poor.

The end customer should be able to get a printed receipt and even hear a voice message (say, "you Rajagopal have deposited Rs 100") in his own language as he may be illiterate. This will require a handheld transaction point device like a point-of-sale device used for credit cards, which will enable biometric identification.

The solution must have a data centre, which will maintain the banking books of account, whose contents will be periodically uploaded to the banks concerned and maintain every bank's data in different buckets.

The banks will continue to take basic decisions, select their customers and decide who gets how much loans. The service will be delivered via this solution and through the correspondent.

But it should also go beyond bringing horse and water together and do things like helping the correspondent (SHG/NGO) to identify customers. This can be achieved, for example, if the system hosts lists of