Very soon you might be able to make payments digitally at a retail outlet without any internet connection on your phone, get personalised banking options when you withdraw cash from an ATM, or even do phone banking over a chat session with a robot.

India’s second largest private sector lender HDFC Bank has onboarded 5 fintech startups who would be able to use the bank’s platforms and provide their innovative fintech solutions to its customers.

“The bank is trying to accomplish customer convenience through innovation. With customers going mobile and expectations increasing the bank is trying to encourage disruptive innovations in the fintech space to get entrepreneurs to use its platform in order to provide the bank customers with more convenience,” said Nitin Chugh, country head of digital banking, HDFC Bank.

The selected startups would be mostly solving payment problems, customer engagement issues and quality assurance. Among the innovators onboarded, S2Pay allows payments to be made at retail outlets without any internet connection for the customer. Another startup Tapits Technologies allows payments to be made only through biometrics without any wallet or any mobile phone.

“The customer can use the HDFC Bank mobile app to access S2Pay to make payments through which a QR code or a 24 digit number is generated which can be either scanned by the merchant or manually punched into his own mobile phone to process the payment,” said Nirmal Juthani, Director, Net Vigil Software, the company which has developed the software.

Pratyush Halen, the founder of Tapit technologies, has devised a POS terminal which would be able to accept payments without cards or wallets but just through biometric details of the customer. “We have already developed the prototype and are in the process of developing the hardware. Our system would be linked to the Aadhar Infrastructure which would validate the customer and forward the payment to the bank which would process it,” he explained.

The bank is yet to decide on the terms of their engagement with the startups however most of them are also in talks to get their technology integrated with different bank platforms. Chugh also explained that the bank would not be funding the startups nor incubating them .

“Based on regulatory norms and compatibility with our bank’s platforms, over a period of time we would be integrating them and offering them to our customers,” Chugh said.

Source: The Economic Times