India’s largest telecom service provider Airtel has rolled out 20,000 e-KYC units on Sunday, 18th of September. This step has been taken in compliance with the notification sent by the Department of Telecom, Govt. of India.
This fully secure process has been initiated to increase the convenience and offer better in-store experience to the customers. It shortens the process by eliminating paperwork. According to a statement by Airtel, the initiative has received a positive response, and the plan is to shortly introduce it to over 50,000 customers across the country. This ramping up of the rollout is expected to increase the number of customers multifold, and in the first phase itself, the company intends to introduce the e-KYC solution in over 50,000 stores across India, including rural areas.
Mr. Ajai Puri, Director of Operations, Bharti Airtel (India and South Asia) said, “We plan to deploy this solution in the majority of our general trade stores, including those in rural pockets.” He also said that this could prove to be a huge step forward in the PM’s Digital India vision.
How Aadhar-based e-KYC works?
Since it is an Aadhar card only based verification, the security will be ironclad. It will require the biometrics of the customer, which includes fingerprint and iris scan. These details will be uploaded online and instantly matched with UIDAI database. The verification notification will follow shortly and the connection will be immediately started in the name of the customer.
The process is simple and convenient, much to the peril of a formerly tedious process. The core of the Digital India initiative lies in making things simple and convenient, and bringing the country up to speed with the technology, equally. This campaign has seen several steps taken to make the country digital, and this is one of them.
This is the time when telecom companies who have been massively affected by the launch of Jio are developing new USPs, to combat an economically fierce new competitor. The $20 billion investment in the Mukesh Ambani-led company, Jio is proving to be a thorn in the side of all the incumbent operators, and even the largest service provider Airtel, along with the giants like Vodafone and Idea have suffered from a setback of a huge chunk of their number of customers. This step by Airtel is just the first to start recovering.
