A Little World is a company which integrates a microfinance model with a new multi-bank payment system in order to bring mainstream banking capabilities to the large population of un-banked rural Indians.
In 2000, Anurag Gupta set up A Little World, to attempt the creation of India’s first payment system, focussed on small value transactions and the bottom of pyramid segment. Anurag, Chief Technology Officer of A Little World (ALW), a Mumbai-based technology solutions provider that helps banks, governments and other institutions to reach out to their customers in far-flung areas of the country. How does the company do this? It harnesses the power of the country’s fastest growing communication network—mobile phones.
ALW has 25,000 agents, mostly women, in 8,300 gram panchayats across 22 states, reaching out to 35 lakh people. These women carry a smart-card-enabled mobile phone which acts like a ‘tiny branch.’ When a customer wants to deposit or withdraw cash from his bank account the agent punches in the details on the mobile. The transaction is then verified by using a fingerprint scanner and a receipt is printed immediately.
The technology is being used to pay National Rural Employment Guarantee Act wages in some states. Gupta hopes that co-operative dairies, too, will come to use his technology.
Anurag has mobilized industry opinion and led initiatives with Banks, regulatory institutions, universities, standards bodies, government and industry to support standardization and enhanced security as the basis of mass deployment in the Indian environment. In 2003, Anurag started a collaborative research and documentation process with IIT-Bombay and the IDRBT-Hyderabad to pilot new generation technologies for small value payment transactions. He started the Go-Mumbai initiative for Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) in Mumbai buses and local suburban railways in 2004 and built the mChek mobile payment product in 2004. He has built the ZERO technology platform for branchless banking, and brought key banks like SBI and industry majors such as Nokia and NXP to support the implementation Financial Inclusion in villages. In 2007 Anurag founded the Zero Microfinance and Savings Support Foundation – a not-for-profit Section 25 Company which today acts as a Business Correspondent to 21 banks in 18 States across India.
ZERO is a popular end-to-end technology driven platform for branchless banking, with plug and play access for banks to rollout their services and, hence increase their outreach. This would make banking, insurance and other such services reach the un-banked population, which is otherwise unfeasible for the institutions to provide directly. The pilot is currently being conducted in 280 villages in seven states with the partnership of several banks from the private, as well as public sectors: State Bank of India, Union Bank of India, Axis Bank (formerly UTI Bank), Andhra Bank, State Bank of Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh Grameen Vikas Bank, and Development Credit Bank.
For now, Gupta has big plans for ALW. In a year, he hopes to serve a crore plus customers. “In two to three years, ALW will serve 5 to 6 crore customers in 1,35,000 gram panchayats—that’s 40% of all gram panchayats in the country,” says Gupta.