Airtel Payments Bank today revealed that it has enabled over 200 villages across India to go cashless.
More than 200 villages in India have access to basic banking services and make digital payments for their daily needs.
Airtel Payments Bank aims to enable 5,000 villages to go cashless.
These villages, which never had access to formal banking, has at least one Airtel Payment Bank outlet to do convenient banking services including cash deposits and withdrawals, and money transfer facility.
Majority of the village households now have a savings account with Airtel Payments Bank and can bank / transact even with basic feature phones.
Merchants / shops in the village accept digital payments via mobile phones from Airtel Payments Bank customers.
Airtel Payments Bank is training farmers / small artisans in the village to accept digital payments for their produce / goods / services.
“With this initiative we are taking banking services to the unbanked and also enabling them to be less reliant on cash. This initiative demonstrates the reach and effectiveness of our retail based model that allows us to take our banking services closer to every Indian,” said Shashi Arora, MD & CEO – Airtel Payments Bank.
Airtel Payments Bank has a network of over 250,000 Airtel retail stores, which function as banking points. Airtel Payments Bank aims to scale its network to 600,000 banking points.
Airtel Payments Bank will not charge processing fee from its customers and merchants partners for digital transactions.
Earlier, Airtel Payments Bank announced plans to make an investment of Rs 3,000 crore across its national operations and plans to build a digital payments ecosystem with over 5 million merchants.
Airtel Payments Bank has already tapped over one million merchants.
Customers can access Airtel Payments Bank’s services on their feature phones as well through USSD by dialing *400#; or via a IVR by dialing 400. Both the USSD & IVR options are available in 12 local languages.
Customers can also access services by dialing 8800688006 in addition to visits to any designated Airtel retail outlet to access services.
