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Six years ago, all Muralidas Bairagi needed was a day job that would provide him ₹5,000 a month to support his family. With no means of financial support, education was not even an option, forget priority.
Today, Bairagi is not only equipped with two diplomas — in Electronic & Telecommunication and Electrical — but also wears an entrepreneurial hat running a small business in his hometown.
A few miles away, Rakesh Parmar — another native of Madhya Pradesh — was struggling to make ends meet as a cash-loading agent. He is now beaming with pride, having built his own house and a store under the ‘Bharat Jankalyan Yojna’. He has plans to launch something bigger.
Bairagi and Parmar are among the 250-plus rural entrepreneurs under the Business Champion (BC) programme conducted by digital payment and financial technology company Financial Software and Systems (FSS), to drive financial literacy in the hinterlands of the country. While Bairagi manages 25 ATMs in the Neemuch district of Madhya Pradesh, catering to 5,000 people every day, Parmar manages 20 ATMs in the Mandsaur district, helping about 9,000 people use ATMs for their various financial needs.
Transaction volume
“For an ATM to be viable, we need at least 3,500 transactions a month. We put out ATMs in places where there are 3,000-4,000 cards. Assume there are 4,000 cards in a region, even if they use their cards at least once in a month, we will have 4,000 transactions,” said V Balasubramanian, President, Merchant and Terminal Business at FSS.
Balasubramanian, who is also a director at the Confederation of ATM industry (CATMi), said: “If each Business Champion handles 20-odd ATMs, we are talking about 80,000 people, so each of these guys are creating financial literacy to almost one lakh people in the country,” he added. To encourage local entrepreneurship and impart basic financial literacy in remote villages, FSS launched the pilot batch of the BC programme in Madhya Pradesh five years ago. Today, FSS has more than 250 BCs — 150-plus BCs in Madhya Pradesh and the remaining in rural villages of West Bengal, Odisha and Tamil Nadu.
Expansion plans
The typical role of a BC involves engaging with local bank branch managers and staff, ensuring ATM visibility, improving ATM transactions, engaging in site repair, maintenance and housekeeping to ensure the ATM is functional at least 92 per cent of the time.
The BCs are paid a fixed remuneration for timely payment of electricity bills, housekeeping services and repairs and maintenance. To retain a skin in the game, the BCs are also paid a transaction-based incentive by FSS. The more ATM transactions, more the scope for incentives.
“When we started, the number of transactions in these ATMs used to be 60-70 per day, but today we are touching about 200 transactions in these villages,” said Balasubramanian.
In addition to providing financial literacy campaigns in local languages, the BCs now sell low-value health insurance products in tie-up with insurance companies. “We are also tying up with mutual fund industry players to offer Systematic Investment Plan (SIPs) starting at ₹100. If we are successful in Madhya Pradesh, we will replicate this in other states,” Balasubramanian said.
The payments solutions company plans to have 1,000 BCs by March 2021 to reach a target of covering close to 10 crore people in rural India.
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