The savings account will serve to accelerate digital adoption in the informal sector opened using Biometric based e-KYC authentication. The savings account will offer free digital transactions; a free NACH setup, zero minimum balance and zero penalty on digital debit decline or mandate bounce. The savings account comes with a Rupay Debit card with a prebuilt insurance cover of up to two lakhs.

Our research revealed that customers in the informal segment are compelled to opt for no-frills bank account over full-service bank accounts dissuaded by a slew of charges like standing instructions set up charges, NACH mandate failure charges, failure to maintain minimum balance charges or SMS alert charges. The fear of such charges being debited lead to the behaviour of instant withdrawal of any credits, including Direct Benefit Transfer credits, thus defeating the very purpose of saving.

The digital app for ki cash is available in many Indian languages. Similarly, instead of SMS alerts for transactions, customers can request for automated voice calls informing them of transactions that are not only available in their language, in many cases, they can even receive such calls in their own dialect allowing compete understanding of the transaction made.

To ensure adoption, ki cash is totally interoperable and will be accepted at over one million AEPS points, over 4 million POS terminals and over 230,000 ATMs.
In order to further enable digital transactions, each ki cash user will receive a Rupay Debit card with a pre-built insurance cover of upto Rs 2 lacs. The account will work with NPCI’s 123Pay service for feature phone customers allowing each customer to experience and unlock the full power of UPI based payments.

ki cash also comes with a loan that can be used for emergencies or other business purposes. The underwriting of such credit will be done by SBM Bank India, supplemented by ‘ki score’, a supervised machine learning based credit health score product by Kaleidofin.

Sucharita Mukherjee, Co-founder, and CEO, Kaleidofin said, “For our informal sector customers and nano enterprises, every penalty, every cost that is incurred for using their bank account makes a difference. While customers trust their bank, they are wary of charges such as those associated with NEFT, bounce, minimum balance that they were unaware of. With SBM Bank India, we aim to revolutionise banking experience for customers by removing any such concern of charges and by offering a very responsive customer support. We can ensure our customers meet their real-life goals via ki cash which allows customers to access regular savings, goal protection and credit. We also anticipate rapid digitalisation with ki cash as it encourages people to use their savings account digitally, as often as possible, without the fear of being charged for it.”

Neeraj Sinha, Head, Retail and Consumer Banking, SBM Bank India, said, “It’s been our endeavour to address real challenges faced by all classes of customers. A ki cash savings account is much more than just an account for its very fully enabled digital design facilitates quicker flows that too at much lower or most in cases zero costs ultimately building savings for customers in the informal sector.”