Financial services being made available to the low-income group at a low cost is known as Financial Inclusion. Banks engage intermediaries to provide such financial services/products through the use of BF and BC. Majority of poor people live in rural India. They do not get banking services. These poor people are excluded from these opportunities.
What is Banking Kiosk ?
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) defines financial inclusion as the process of ensuring access to financial services and timely and adequate credit where needed by vulnerable groups such as weaker sections and low income groups at an affordable cost. In the essence of financial inclusion, KIOSK banking is an important concept and basically developed for rural areas of country where less number of banks are and people can’t reach to the bank to use their services. It is conceived that the kiosks will functions with the support of leading banks in the private, public and cooperative sectors and using the shops as a touch-point for basic banking services such as cash deposits, withdrawals and remittances apart from micro-credit and insurance. Like the ordinary bank branches, the kiosks will offer all the basic services of banking. At present there are around 31 Crore savings bank accounts in India.
- Number of actual account holders is not more than 20 Crores.
- State Bank of India is the largest Bank with over 15000 branches.
- Bank of India is having over 3000 branches across India.
- In Jan 2006 RBI permitted Banks to engage BCs for setting up Banking Kiosk.
- Manglam Village in Pondicherry became the First village in India where all households were provided Banking Facility.
- Unbanked Villages have been identified / earmarked under the Financial Inclusion Plan (FIP) by Ministry of Finance GOI ,where banking services are to be made available by way of a brick and mortar branch or any IT based model ( Kiosks).
- 83% People in India still do not have savings bank account.
- State Bank Group is having around 20000 branches.
- RBI’s vision for 2020 is to open 600 million new customer accounts.
- Relaxations have been made in KYC norms for opening accounts under Kiosk Banking.
- A designated official from the bank’s link branch has to visit the ultra small branch / Kiosk branch at least once a week.
