India Post Payments Bank Crosses Milestone of 2 Crore Customers

The Union Minister for Communications, Electronics & IT and Law & Justice Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad today announced that India Post Payments Bank (IPPB) has achieved an important milestone of 2 crore customers, providing a major impetus to Government’s efforts in furthering financial inclusion in unbanked and underbanked areas across the country.

In August last year, IPPB had reached the landmark of 1 crore customers in just its first year of operations. The next 1 crore customers have been acquired and onboarded in just 5 months. On an average, IPPB has been opening/maintaining a run rate of 33 lakh accounts per quarter.

Speaking on the milestone of 2 crore customers, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister for Communications, Electronics & IT and Law & Justice said, “The success of IPPB’s business model underlines the Government’s intent in creating an interoperable banking infrastructure for the public good contributing toward changing the financial inclusion landscape in India. Since its launch, IPPB has enabled more than 1.36 Lakh Post Offices and 1.9 Lakh Dakiyas to provide a complete suite of banking services at the doorstep of the customer providing access to any Aadhaar linked bank account, leading to an increase in rural banking infrastructure by almost 2.5 times.”

With the launch of Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AePS) Services in September 2019, IPPB has now become the single largest platform in the country for providing interoperable banking services to the customers of any bank. With AePS services any common person with a bank account linked to Aadhaar can perform basic banking services such as cash withdrawals and balance enquiry irrespective of the bank they hold their account with. To avail these services, a customer with an Aadhaar linked account can simply authenticate his/her identity with fingerprint scan & Aadhaar authentication to complete a transaction. AePS services are bank-agnostic and are driven by an inexpensive infrastructure enabling low cost delivery of doorstep banking services to every section of the society without discrimination.

IPPB has implemented one of the largest ever digital financial literacy programs by investing over 1 crore man hours in training and certifying more than 250,000 Postal Assistants, Postmen and GDS as Banking Service providers. The Bank has also digitized all the post office counters through a simple QR Code to accept electronic payments and also enabled direct payments into various post office saving schemes and purchase of postal products.