Retail banking in Africa is very weak. You can't go to a village and get money from an ATM or visit a branch of the bank. So people have to use the Internet.
I'm totally convinced that the battleground of banking is not the front office. The battleground is the back end.
We are extremely focused on building some of the assets which are going into mid-India, semi-urban and rural, and that's our DNA. We are building a retail bank, and a lot of the deposit base is still in urban India.
The idea of creating a national bank I do not concur in, because it seems now decided that Congress has not that power (although I sincerely wish they had it exclusively), and because I think there is already a vast redundancy rather than a scarcity of paper medium.
Payments banks can also act as business correspondents of other banks.
If we want to be the banker to every Indian as we want to be, then we will have to use technology.
Banks can send big corporate payments through existing channels or send a small payment through Ripple. They don't have to rip out existing infrastructure; they can use Ripple to make the transactions more profitable or more efficient.
In Mexico, a network of government-operated rural convenience stores is offering banking services to rural communities.
Why should a country have to take on itself a huge burden of managing a totally cash economy?
Though the demonetisation move should be welcomed, govt should have planned well in advance to ensure that no common man suffer.
There are tens of thousands of bank branches and 4,000 currency chests. We need to be careful and try that this is a number which is not a mere estimate but a verified number both physically and in the accounting sense.
