Digital technology has helped in a big way to enable provision of banking services at the grassroots level during the period lockdown, the Finance Ministry said on Monday.
This can be gauged from the popularity of the Aadhaar-enabled Payment System (AePS) during this difficult period with average daily transactions doubling to 113 lakhs over the last 40 days.
According to Department of Financial Services (DFS) in the Finance Ministry, a total of 43 crore transactions of Rs 16,101 crore were made during the lockdown. This is double the rate prior to this period.
"Avg. daily AePS transactions doubled to 113 Lakh: Total 43 Cr. tran sactions of Rs. 16,101 Cr. made during the lockdown. DFS Congratulates the whole banking system & lauds BCs/CSPs for making it possible by providing services via biometric devices even in remote areas," DFS said in tweet on Monday.
AePS is a bank-led model which allows basic interoperable banking transactions at point of sale (PoS or MicroATM) through the business correspondent of any bank by using Aadhaar authentication.
Using this system, a bank customer can use Aadhaar as identity to access respective Aadhaar-enabled bank account and perform basic banking transactions like cash withdrawal, intrabank or interbank fund transfer and balance enquiry.
From the customer point, the only things required to complete a transaction are the name of the customer's bank, Aadhaar number and fingerprint captured during enrollment.
( With inputs from IANS )