| | DECEMBER 20198By Manoj Kumar Nambiar (Managing Director) & Arvind Murarka (Head - IT), Arohan Financial ServicesAn industry expert, Nambiar has been promoting and instituting innovations in the IT industry. Arvind is an IT industry veteran with 28 years of experience in working with companies such as Kris Systems, Softweb Technologies, Medica Group, and GPT Infraprojects, to name a few.Recent studies state that over 19 percent of the Indian population is still unbanked or is financially excluded. Finan-cial Inclusion is undoubtedly one of the most important milestones that the Government and the RBI focus on and must be attained for sustainable growth of the popula-tion. The main objective of finan-cial inclusion is to ensure access to formal credit for people who depend on informal sources for fulfilling their financial needs at an affordable cost in a fair and transparent manner. This will not only help close the gap between the advantaged and disadvan-taged sections of the society, but also contribute significantly to the country's socio-economic growth. This is the space where the micro-finance industry operates in.Microfinance Industry caters to customers, primarily women, in the rural and semi-urban areas where mainstream banking is in-adequate. The Indian microfinance industry has NBFC MFIs, SFBs, NBFCs and also universal banks operating in the space. In its efforts to mainstream financial inclusion in India, MFIs provide loans and distribute financial products like insurance, banking and pension products, as well as other non-fi-nancial products. These small ticket sized loans do not require collateral; prospective customers are identified based on neigh-bourhoods and needs. However, managing microfinance business without using enterprise manage-ment systems, automation, mea-surement and optimization of the day-to-day operational process is both inefficient and resource con-suming. MFIs also have to strive to lower their operating costs as this gets added to the cost of funds for the final pricing to the end customer. MFIs were thus quick to understand the potential and need for digitization of operations and have taken the much needed step with the implementation of mobility platforms.The purpose of mobility is to capture operational transactions in the field on a real time basis, using mobile applications and hardware such as tablets/smart-phones. We have been one of the first NBFC MFIs to move beyond a pilot phase to a full rollout phase within eight months. In our or-ganization, all our 2500 odd cus-tomer service representatives have been equipped with hand-held devices. We have utilized mobile application to onboard members, track their training, disburse loans, and use it to collect repayments. All the transactions are routed through the mobile application and have seamless integration with our Core Banking System. Hence, the front end of the loan process has been made fully pa-perless. The scope of digitization encompasses facilitation of vari-ous processes in the overall man-THOUGHT LEADERSHIPINTRODUCING FINANCIAL ATTRIBUTES TO PEOPLEManoj Kumar Nambiar
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