Sa-Dhan, the largest and the oldest association of microfinance institutions and Delhi based fintech solutions provider NextGen join hands to bring digital micro finance solutions to millions of feature phone users, which is around 45 percent of the mobile phone using population and about 94 million beneficiaries under the MFI ecosystem.
“Micro finance institutions have their presence in over 600 districts in India and there is a need to bring in technology-based solutions to reduce the operational costs for these institutions and enable easy finance availability in tier two and tier three cities / rural areas of India. In order to enable this solution, we must target the whole gamut of humble feature phone users,” said Taron Mohan, Founder, NextGen while announcing the tie-up with Sa-Dhan.
Sa-Dhan has over 150 MFI institutions under its umbrella and their collective grievance is handling of cash collection against the EMI’s. Since most of these MFI clients do not possess a smart phone, digital payment becomes difficult in this segment. Hence, there is an immediate need for cohesive digital EMI collection solution to reduce their overall operational costs through non-smart / feature phone segment, explained Taron.
“Digitization in collections in microfinance sector has been a great challenge as most of the MFI clients do not possesses smart phones. In this connection the association with NextGen will help in developing a new payment and collection system by using feature phone with the technological intervention being provided by them. We see a great future for this initiative to bring this segment on the digital financial inclusion platform and achieving the Prime Minister’s digital mission.” said Jiji Mammen, ED & CEO, Sa-Dhan.
NextGen intends to bring technical solutions like setting up an UPI Auto pay platform for regular EMIs as an auto pay function, riding on the UPI 123Pay service platform with NPCI, he shared. With the partnership, come many additional benefits for the beneficiaries of the MFI ecosystem including UPI, banking and wallets, bill payments system, individual and merchant money transfers and an interface enabling raising requests of micro loans and insurance. There are about 45 million Individual beneficiaries under the MFI organisations and of most of them are on feature phones.
