NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

PUNE: Payments company Mobikwik is partnering with non-government organisation Samagra to provide ICT-enabled mobile wallets to the urban slum dwellers the NGO works with.

Mrinal Sinha, COO of Mobikwik, told ET that this would help in promoting savings behaviour among people. “Once the money is digitised, then Samagra would potentially look at providing other services on top of this, like mobile recharge, bill payments and access through products and services through ecommerce,” said Sinha.

At present, people who want to save through Samagra hand over their money to the NGO’s representative who visits them. Under the new system, the money will continue to be handed over to a Samagra representative, but would then reflect in the persons Mobikwik wallet, or micro gullak (piggybank), as it is being called.

Samagra runs a community toilet programme. The ladies in charge of managing these toilets will act as agents and help people in opening Mobikwik accounts, said Swapnil Chaturvedi, CEO of Samagra.