E-banking comes into an Indian village

In India inhabitants of a village gain access to bank credit through biometric verification and cell-phones. It's a 90-minute walk from this southern Indian village--one of 730,000 in India--to Doddabenavengala, the nearest town with a bank branch. Previously a villager with no bank account and respectively with no access to formal bank credit had to pay 10 percent monthly interest to informal lenders.

Now by means of a desktop terminal a customer in this village can deposit for instance 150 rupees (about $3.50) ) into the new account at Corporation Bank, with help of the appointed village resident who conducts these transactions in her concrete house as a bank representative.

A customer proves his identity with a smart card and a thumbprint scan. Then the bank representative updates the bank balance information on the customer’s smart card by connecting the terminal to the bank database with a cell phone. Finally, the customer hands the representative the cash and gets a receipt for his/her deposit.