And they paid happily ever after…

“It was rather early in a foggy morning, Sean Philip, VP of Marketing at a global major at New York hopped into Noah’s to grab a bagel. Same time, little early in the breezy night, Kumaran, the seasoned fisherman at a hamlet in Tuticorin southern coast of India stepped into local store to get his fishing hooks. Sean waves the payment counter with his iPhone and walk off while Kumaran leaves his finger print at the payment counter. Well., either ways the payment is done!”

While mature economies have embraced state-of-art technologies via sophisticated channels., emerging nations are quicker to adopt latest of technologies to enable digital payments with cheapest of the channels for the masses.

Emerging nations with majority of population just about the middle and lower income group and need to be financially included, biometric authentication seem to be the fastest way of inclusion and a seamless digital payment enabler.

As an example of emerging geographies, about 60 to 70% of India’s billion plus population are from rural or semi-urban areas who need access to biometric based acquiring channels. The Financial Inclusion programs have already shown tremendous growth in terms of digital transactions happening across the nation. This will further surge in huge volumes.

As the volumes surge, the backend systems have to be run on a super robust, high performance and scalable platforms like HP-NonStop.

Biometric Payments bring in disruption around acquiring space

Consumers  

Customers can make frictionless, secure purchases anytime, anywhere with just their biometric (fingerprint, iris etc.,) with associated unique citizen ID or number, eliminating hassle of multiple apps, card swipes, remembering passwords, downloading e-wallets or even carrying a phone.

Merchants

Biometric methods allow leap-frogging of existing expensive POS infrastructure to accept electronic payments. Beyond the transaction, merchants benefit from a suite of added value services including support for QR codes, ability to dynamically configure discounts and rewards, generate green invoices, immediate credit to merchant bank accounts, faster refund initiation, and settlement and transaction data reporting.

Acquirers

On the acquirer side, Biometric methods of payment disrupt traditional POS terminals. The solution reshapes expensive acquirer distribution and underwriting models by allowing banks to target previously under-penetrated segments with an efficient technology and commercial framework, easing the way for rapid onboarding expansion of new acceptance points. The smallest street vendor, with the help of a basic 2G phone and a biometric (fingerprint scanner ) device, can accept electronic payments. Overall this translates into lower merchant fees and customer convenience.

FSS Aadhaar Pay

FSS Aadhaar Pay is a biometric enabled cashless payment system that allows customers to use biometric authentication to make payments without a physical payment instrument, like card, mobile phone, etc.

In India, Aadhaar is a unique 12-digit identification number issued by the Indian Government to every Indian citizen based on their biometric and demographic information. This information is stored with UIDAI (Unique ID Authority of India) India Stack that provides APIs.

FSS Aadhaar Pay provides both (a) front-end mobile application for merchants receiving payments using customers’ fingerprints and (b) back-end server middleware for the acquiring bank to perform authentication using India Stack API and further processing of transactions. The backend will be referenced on world’s leading platform HP-NonStop in the days to come as the performance and scalability requirements continue to surge up.

For more information, please write to FSS Marketing team: products@fss.co.in