India’s Seed Financial Services Pvt. Ltd. has secured yet another a contract from Chennai-based Indian Bank Ltd. to support a smart card-based financial-inclusion project, the New Delhi-based financial-services provider announced Dec. 29.
Seed Financial will provide more than 1,500 personnel to help support the project, which will cover approximately 5,500 villages, primarily in the state of Tamil Nadu in the southern part of India, Seed Financial noted in a news release.
PaymentsSource reported earlier that Tata Consultancy Services signed a three-year agreement worth 850 million rupees (US$18.7 million or 14 million euros) to assist with the technology aspects of the project (
The project’s goal is to bring banking services to all villages with at least 2,000 residents either by increasing Indian Bank’s branch network or correspondents available to provide banking services via handheld biometric devices.
The project could help to bring banking services to 2.3 million rural citizens by offering them the chance to open accounts that support cash withdrawals, remittances, funds transfers and check services.
Seed Financial also is assisting in Indian Bank’s similar financial-inclusion projects in the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Punjab Orissa, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh.
India’s financial-inclusion roadmap, designed by the Reserve Bank of India, calls for providing such basic banking services as savings and payments to all of India’s villages by March 2012. Only 35,000 villages out of 600,000 villages would have bank branches, while banking correspondents would cover the rest.
What do you think about this? Send us your feedback.
