Kudumbashree, the State poverty eradication mission, and State Bank of Travancore will jointly implement a business correspondent enabling programme.

Announcing this, a spokesperson for Kudumbashree said here on Monday that training has been given to prospective ‘customer service providers' (business correspondents) for 27 revenue villages in the State.

CLEAR UNDERSTANDING

The training comprised mainly of a session aimed at providing a clear and comprehensive understanding to the participants on banking service facilities and conduct of transactions through point of service (POS) machines.

The business correspondent is expected to provide services such as opening of savings/ zero balance accounts; collection of deposit amounts and repayments; and extending credit, among others, to the beneficiary individual or groups.

Every such individual customer or group of customers would be given a biometric card.

This card would be swiped on the POS machine for transacting banking business.

SBT PLANS

State Bank of Travancore (SBT) intends to enlist at least one lakh such customers, according to the spokesperson.

Self-help groups affiliated with Kudumbashree will be in charge of the micro ATMs at the customer service centres in the villages.

Since these centres are enabled to transact all banking services, customers would not anymore be required to go to bank branches for this purpose.

The technological support for the SBT-Kudumbashree initiative — hardware, software and Java smart cards empowered by radio frequency identification technology — is being provided by Bartronics India of Hyderabad.

The biometric data will help identify the customer, who would initially be granted a zero balance account, a conventional credit card or a Kisan credit card, and a thrift deposit account.

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