India Post Payments Bank Rolls Out Aadhaar-Enabled Payment System Services Communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad asked the differentiated bank to increase its bank accounts count to 5 crore by 2020 from 1 crore at present

India Post Payments Bank (IPPB) on Monday rolled out Aadhaar-Enabled Payment System (AePS) services, exactly a year after it started business operations. The bank also achieved the milestone of opening 1 crore bank accounts.

Speaking at the commemoration ceremony in New Delhi, communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad urged IPPB to increase its customer base and accounts by five times by 2020 and aim for higher digital transactions and help India's digital transformation.

Prasad said if 30 crore Jan Dhan accounts can be opened in a period of 1.5 years, IPPB too can achieve higher numbers.

Digital transactions in India has multiplied post demonetisation in 2016 with volumes rising to 296 crore and value up to INR 283 lakh crore in June 2019. Prasad said IPPB should be able to clock transactions worth INR 5 lakh crore in another year from the current INR 6,000 crore.

IPPB comes under the Department of Posts. It started business with 650 branches, 3,250 post offices and 10,000 postmen. In 2019, the numbers increased to 195,000 postmen and 136,000 post offices in India.

"With the launch of AePS services, IPPB has now become the single-largest interoperable platform in the country. By leveraging AePS, customers can now access their accounts with any bank by simply using their fingerprint for cash withdrawal and balance enquiry right at their doorstep through the postmen and GDS (Grameen Dak Sevak)," said Suresh Sethi, managing director and chief operating officer, IPPB.

IPPB, a differentiated bank, can accept deposits of up to Rs 1 lakh and can offer remittance services, mobile payments and other banking services such as net banking, debit-cum-ATM cards and third-party fund transfers. However, payments banks are restricted from lending and at least 75% of the deposits it gets are invested in government securities and the rest is deposited with other scheduled commercial banks as demand and time deposits. This category of banks earn by charging transaction fee from customers.

To increase its revenue sources, IPPB plans to start cross-selling financial products such as insurance and mutual funds.

"IPPB's unparalleled network complimented with robust interoperable technology platform set up by National Payments Corporation of India is poised to take banking to each and every household across the remotest parts of the country. 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," IPPB said in a release.