Over the past decade, technology has shown tremendous impact in many industries. With the change of customer behaviour and the emergence of regulatory compliances, the landscape of the financial industry is changing. Customers are demanding a multi- and cross-channel experience, which is real-time as well as available round the clock. Thus, Banks are changing their approach from traditional product-centric to a customer-centric approach. This has resulted in banks looking for new age solutions to redefine customer experience. Earlier if a customer wanted to send money abroad, then they might have to go to the bank or financial institution branch and it took 2-3 days to get funds credited to the receiver’s account but now money can be transferred at any time by just a few clicks using a mobile phone.

Consumer’s appetite has been ever increasing for high-end digital experiences including seamless and easy accessibility of all financial products at their fingertips. Responding to these demands, Fintechs are building revolutionary financial products and experiences by using APIs to quickly deploy a suite of advanced financial services and products.

What is an API and how does it work?

API stands for an Application Programming Interface. It’s a digital interface which acts as an intermediary to allow two different systems to talk to each other. 

A very prominent example of API usage which most of us have seen on many websites nowadays – “log-in using Google/Facebook/Twitter”. With just one click we automatically login on to the website or app but have you ever wondered how it works

It looks very easy and simple for users. Every time the application loads, it uses the API to check whether the user is already logged in using any social media platform. If not, when the user clicks the “Log-in Using google” button, a pop-up opens where the user is asked for confirmation to log in with the selected google profile. After the confirmation, the API interacts with the google system and provides the application with identification information to provide auto-login.

Digitalisation has fastened the transformation of the banking industry globally in the last few years. APIs are playing a very important role in the field of payments, Peer to peer management, Insurance, trading and many more. Fintech APIs are creating financial products and services faster and in more cost-effective than ever before. Now Banks, financial institutions and merchants can easily connect with third-party service providers and expand their products and services very quickly. Online shopping of groceries and household goods is a new trend all over the world, merchants are providing seamless payment experience with various payment methods to customers. Customers can easily transfer funds, make purchases, buy insurance, take loans and perform personal banking tasks on the go.

In short, APIs have transformed Financial institutions and Banks as a platform that offer customer-centric products and fill the gaps of legacy banking practices.

Fintech APIs provide access to data among the parties involved in financial transactions, including banks, third-party providers, websites and consumers.

Nowadays a new concept of Open APIs is on the rise. Open APIs allows third-party service providers to access the data and services of an organization in a controlled environment. It provides opportunities to create new products and adds new functionality to its core offering. 

Benefits of Fintech APIs 

• Real-Time Access: APIs have achieved real-time money transfer globally with minimal effort and are available to customers 24/7. APIs are changing how we interact with the world, and all these actions happen in real-time.

• Revenue Opportunity: Earlier banks were quite secretive about their client information due to security concerns. With APIs, the financial institutions can provide easy accessibility of big data which can help them in creating highly personalized financial services and enhance the decision capabilities of the business. 

• Cost-effectiveness: Instead of spending high cost in developing the system from scratch, the financial institutions can use these Fintech APIs and significantly reduce development costs.

• Accelerated time to market: By using fintech APIs Financial institutions can spend more time and resources to focus on innovation instead of repetitive development tasks. Create fully functional digital services within days instead of months.

To compete with the currency digitalisation banks and financial institutions need to transform their existing core banking services using Fintech APIs. Fintech APIs help in bridging the existing legacy gap between the financial institutions and customer’s requirements. Features and functions from legacy applications can be easily pulled out and combined into processes that authorised users and other applications can access from anywhere, anytime.

In Today’s world of Digitalisation, the Government of India (GoI) is taking steps to provide the infrastructure and technology to promote the digital payment ecosystem. GoI has initiated steps like BHIM Aadhaar Pay, an alternative for online and card based payment to popularize digital payments in Rural India which forms 65% of Indian Population. Aadhaar pay is still not accepted by the merchant and the customers of rural areas because of lack of any awareness about Aadhaar Pay solutions and its benefits. In the absence of any publicity campaigns about Aadhaar Pay in print media or broadcast media, customers find it difficult to trust Aadhaar Pay.  

What is Aadhaar Pay?

Aadhaar Pay is a smartphone app for individual merchants developed by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). Using this app, merchants can receive instant payments in their bank accounts from the customers having an account with any of the banks. Aadhaar Pay uses Aadhaar number along with validation using biometric authentication or OTP sent on the Aadhaar linked mobile number. This is extremely helpful in rural contexts, since most rural users do not remember their password and PIN. 

How does Aadhaar Pay work ?

Rahul is an owner of a kirana store in a small village of India. Mohan is a regular customer and purchases all the household goods from his shop. Today while making payment for the goods, Mohan realised that he had forgotten his wallet at home and requested Rahul to make a note of the bill amount and he will clear these dues tomorrow. On hearing this, Rahul informed Mohan about the concept of Aadhaar pay. At first, Mohan was confused because he had never heard about it. However, after Rahul explained to Mohan that he can use aadhar based payment process to make direct payment from his bank account without the need of an ATM card or a smartphone, Mohan decided to give it a try. 

Rahul logged into Aadhaar Pay through a mobile app of his bank using his Aadhaar number and typed the bill amount. Thereafter, Mohan typed his Aadhaar number and selected his Aadhaar linked bank name and completed the transaction by authenticating with a fingerprint. After the completion of payment both Rahul and Mohan instantly received confirmation messages on their phones.

Mohan’s story highlights the need for a “payment solution” that would simplify and digitize transactions especially for those with low literacy levels in rural areas.

Aadhaar pay will help merchants to receive funds on a real time basis and no MDR is charged by the bank. Currently, approximately  96 crore bank accounts are linked with Aadhaar including 75% of Jan Dhan Yojana accounts. Some of the largest banks in India such as State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Andhra Bank, Syndicate Bank, IndusInd Bank and IDFC First Bank have gone live with Aadhar Pay. 

Despite its high utility and ease of user experience, the reliability and security of Biometric authentication pose a high challenge to its wider acceptability. The task becomes particularly challenging when there have been cases of leakage of Aadhaar data. UIDAI has tried to mitigate such concerns by ensuring that the Aadhaar database is not directly connected to the service provider and all the authentication is done through APIs only. Another main concern is that many people in India do not have clear fingerprints due to the nature of their work causing high authentication failure during fingerprint impressions on the biometric reader. However, this problem has drastically reduced as Biometric readers have evolved ever since and now new biometric readers including iris scan are being used which are more reliable.

Challenges faced in Implementing Aadhaar Pay

Technical Challenge

According to UIDAI, ~ 16 lakh Aadhaar authentication requests fail every week mainly due to problems faced in capturing fingerprints mainly due to very high match ratio (98%) being set in certified Biometric readers.

 Administration Challenge

Only prerequisite for Aadhaar pay has been linking a Bank account number with Aadhaar. However, the Honourable Supreme Court of India has made the linking non-mandatory in its judgement. 

Key to the success of any new tech enabled platform is the absolute trust and confidence of customers and service providers that their privacy will be protected and transaction is secured. To make Aadhaar pay more secure and safer than card payments, there should be proper laid down procedures for Certification and Testing of third party apps used by merchants for payments. This would build confidence in authenticity and reliability of Aadhaar pay and would promote its use amongst the mass population. 

Way Forward

Based on our market understanding and research, we conclude that the potential of Aadhaar Pay is still underutilised and the idea of cashless India can still be achieved with Aadhaar pay with support from all stakeholders. GOI and banks should create awareness and incentive schemes for Aadhaar Pay amongst merchants and customers especially for rural areas using both print and digital media.

We feel that Aadhaar Pay will create an ecosystem especially for rural demographics wherein customers have ease of payments and merchants have quick access to the payment with a comparatively low- cost payment solution.