The Gemalto technology stores transaction records inside the smart card to enable microbanking and is designed to simplify access to financial services for the under-banked population in rural India.
Financial Information Network & Operations (FINO) provides end-to-end core banking technology, including smart cards, to microfinance partners, banks and non-governmental organizations involved in serving low-income households in the urban and rural regions in India as business correspondents of large institutions.
Each FINO card developed by Gemalto can hold up to 15 different types of secure applications that facilitate financial services such as deposit remittances, savings, loans, insurance and e-purses. In addition, the card acts as an electronic statement to log all transactions, with the ability to store the last 150 transactions.
Transactions are validated using biometric authentication. End-user transactions are approved after fingerprint information is read using low-cost readers and then verified by the card microcomputer at business correspondents’ facilities and at selected retail outlets and partner premises.
One of the biggest challenges in the microbanking industry is the huge amount of paperwork and human effort traditionally involved in supporting micro-transactions and credit-scoring potential customers. High costs coupled with low returns did not make microfinance viable beyond a certain threshold, thus hampering growth, said Manish Khera, CEO of FINO. This one-card-does-all solution resolves these barriers to growth by providing end-users with an easy-to-use and highly secure mode to conduct financial transactions, and for us to supervise transactions electronically.
