| | DECEMBER 20199MICROFINANCE INDUSTRY CATERS TO CUSTOMERS, PRIMARILY WOMEN, IN THE RURAL AND SEMI-URBAN AREASagement of loans, including KYC feed, online Credit Bureau checks, immediate approval/rejection of customer's loan application on the basis of Credit Bureau response, Centre & Group formation, GEO mapping of Centre, disbursement & collection entry and dashboards for various operational purposes. If locations are remote and ex-perience weak network connectivity, mobile applications capture the transactions offline and upload them when a steady connection is available. Thus the field employee truly has the `office in his/her hands' to empow-er him/her and also to provide online services to the end clients while working towards delight.It is also the right time for MFIs to on-board their customers onto a digital transactions platform. In over a year of demonetisation, the digital payments and transactions segment has been the most focused within the Indian FinTech land-scape. While mobility plug-ins with the back-end Loan Management System, it also facilitates Business Correspondents and Partnerships to explore possibilities of cashlight/less disbursements and collections, and geo-tagging helps identify re-mote customer meeting points. Unique efforts have been made in our organisation to partner with banks, both old school and new age payment banks, in order to bring not only a bank account, but also provide accessible banking ser-vices and products to the unbanked. With the help of tech enabled field staff who carry mobile tablets to on-board customers, this is indeed a well-timed effort to enroll cus-tomers for instant bank accounts using Aadhar enabled e-KYC. This digital finance platform will be the basis for customers to conduct assisted financial transactions with financial institutions, as well as within their own communities. Our estimates show a close to one bil-lion e-transactions possibility per year in the sector which has over 40 million beneficiaries.The prevailing micro-finance model of group lending is high-ly cash intensive, where both loan disbursement and repayment is generally done in cash and gen-erally at the customers' doorstep. This is a tedious time-consuming process, requiring meticulous cal-culations which bear heavily on the MFI's front-line staff. An effi-cient digital system allows staff to source new clients and helps them provide quality service to their ex-isting customers in a shorter span of time. The benefits of digitiza-tion have been felt throughout our organization, where turn-around-times have reduced up to 50 per-cent across processes and the flex-ibility of our solution reduces the time to market for customers and new products.With technology, innovation and knowledge becoming the key drivers of growth today, the MFI industry is transforming. Emerg-ing technologies have the poten-tial to revolutionize the customer experience, especially at the `last mile' by providing greater levels of personalized service and great-ly improving the back-office effi-ciencies at financial institutions, thus playing one of the most sig-nificant roles in the objective of financial inclusion.
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