By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, SEPT 09, 2019: THE Union Minister for Communications, Electronics & IT and Law & Justice, Mr Ravi Shankar Prasad, today announced the rollout of Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AePS) Services by India Post Payments Bank (IPPB), giving a strong boost to its efforts in expanding access to financial services for millions of unbanked and underbanked customers. Speaking at the First Anniversary Celebrations of IPPB here, the Minister congratulated IPPB for achieving the milestone of one Crore customers and exhorted them to achieve 5 crore target in next one year. Referring to 440 Central schemes on-boarded to the DBT platform, Mr Prasad said that all these schemes must ride on IPPB platform too. He said, ‘Inclusive' is the key mantra of the government and the department of Posts should strive for Banking the unbanked, funding the unfunded and securing the unsecured.

With the launch of AEPS services, IPPB has now become the single largest platform in the country for providing interoperable banking services to the customers of ANY BANK by leveraging the last mile unprecedented reach of the Postal network.

IPPB's unparalleled network complimented with robust interoperable technology platform set up by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is poised to take banking to each & every household across the remotest parts of the country. With AePS services any common person with a bank account linked to Aadhaar can perform basic banking services such as cash withdrawals and balance enquiry irrespective of the bank they hold their account with. To avail these services, a customer with an Aadhaar linked account can simply authenticate his/her identity with fingerprint scan & Aadhaar authentication to complete a transaction. AePS services are bank-agnostic and are driven by an inexpensive infrastructure enabling low cost delivery of doorstep banking services to every section of the society without discrimination, thus bringing forth the dawn of a ‘Truly Inclusive Financial System'.

Speaking about the launch of AePS services, Shri Prasad said, “As the biggest Financial Inclusion initiative in the world, Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana brought millions into the economic mainstream. There are over 34 crore Jan Dhan accounts out of which 22 crore account holders are in rural India. With IPPB's AePS Services, we now have the ability to provide Interoperable Doorstep banking services to customers of ANY BANK including the 34 crore Jan Dhan account holders, by leveraging the unprecedented last mile reach of IPPB. This fulfills the Hon'ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi's vision set forth at the time of launch of IPPB last year of ushering in economic transformation by bringing banks to the doorsteps of the villagers and poor. I wish IPPB and its management all the success in its future growth journey.”