World Bank and International Banks Showing interest to partner
with DOP.
The Department of Post
will be rolling out 10,000 ATMs and 20,000 micro ATMs across the country by the
end of this year.
Finance Minister Arun
Jaitley had announced that to provide better access to financial services,
especially in rural areas, the government will undertake a massive nationwide
roll-out of ATMs and micro ATMs in post offices over the next three years.
DoP has already announced
plans to open 1,000 ATMs by March.
Department of Post (DoP)
will soon also approach the Reserve Bank of India for interoperability of its
ATMs with commercial banks as it looks to roll out 10,000 ATMs across the
country by the end of this year.
Communications and IT
Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has asked the department to take the proposal to
RBI on a priority basis as it will help in popularising banking in rural areas.
Interoperability of
postal ATMs will help people to withdraw money from their bank accounts also.
Currently, such ATMs can be used if people have an account in DoP.
The government wants to
leverage the vast network of India Post for implementing the mandate of
financial inclusion and it has received renewed momentum from the Budget
recommendations.
India Post has more than
576 ATMs across the country and has also overtaken the State Bank of India to
become India's largest core banking network having 18,231 branches.
By March, all the 25,000
departmental post offices would offer anywhere banking facilities using core
banking solutions.
As on February, India
Post has issued 1,26,181 ATM/debit cards to its account holders.
The Public Investment
Board has already approved the Rs 800-crore proposal from India Post for
setting up a payments bank.
PIB, under the Finance
Ministry, whets the investment proposals by state-run entities.
The department is also in
the process of finalising selection of a consultant for setting up of the India
Post payments bank.
India Post payments bank will
primarily target the unbanked and under-banked customers in rural, semi-rural
and remote areas, with a focus on providing simple deposit products and money
remittance services.
The pilot for the
payments bank is set to start from January and the full-fledged operations may
start by March 2017.
As many as 40
international financial conglomerates including World Bank and Barclays have
shown interest to partner the postal department for setting up the bank.
Reserve Bank has granted
payments bank permit to the department, which is already into providing
financial services and has 1.55 lakh branches across the country.