India fintech roundup: fingerprinting ATMs, FreeCharge and Paytm go opposite ways and more

Payment gateways, e-wallets, banks, microlenders… the list of fintech players in India goes on and on. It’s an exciting time and something new seems to happen every day. Here’s our weekly roundup of what’s happening in this fast-moving space.

ATMs that use fingerprints

Photo credit: J P Davidson.

A bank in Mumbai now lets people withdraw money with just a fingerprint. DCB Bank on Sunday launched an ATM that uses biometrics to authenticate people.

It’s powered by the Aadhar database, which is a project launched by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) that hopes to collect the biometric information of every single person in India.

As of March 31, 999 million people have signed up for an Aadhar number. The government promises that Aadhar will never be mandatory, but it’s rolled out plenty of reasons to sign up for it, including scholarships and subsidies on utilities.

DCB claims to be the first bank in India to do something like this. It’s a small-sized lender, which means that it works primarily with small and medium-business and individuals. Once fingerprint technology is set up, it requires minimal documentation, which is why it’s ideally suited for the demographic that UIDAI expects will be using Aadhar – non-urban and low-income communities.

Paytm and Freecharge move in opposite directions

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Paytm is considered India’s largest e-wallet, and FreeCharge India’s fastest growing one, so there’s always something brewing between the two.

FreeCharge announced a partnership with payment gateway CCAvenue last week. Payment gateways aggregate different payment options – from debit cards to net banking to mobile wallets – and provide them to customers on a single interface.

This new partnership means that FreeCharge will be an option whenever CCAvenue is used to pay for things online. CCAvenue claims to offer over 300 different payment options.

Govind Rajan, COO of FreeCharge, explained his reasoning simply in a statement: “We want to make FreeCharge wallet ubiquitous in both the online and offline space by creating an ecosystem of partnership.”

What Govind means is, the more the merrier – having more payment options does not necessarily correlate to less customers for FreeCharge.

This is the exact opposite of what Paytm announced a few days earlier. It’s shutting down all affiliations with payment gateways – including CCAvenue – which means that any transaction that involves the mobile wallet will have to be done on Paytm’s own platform.

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