Visa partners with Micro Pension

Mumbai  Oct 09, 2013(Sailesh Gandhi):Strengthening its commitment to becoming a partner and enabler to promote the nation’s financial inclusion agenda, Visa announced a partnership with Micro Pension Foundation, an Indian non-profit organization.

The partnership will establish a Micro Pension Visa Financial Inclusion Lab as an incubator of innovative payment solutions, targeting 140 million low income, unbanked, informal sector individuals, providing them with access to affordable, micro-savings and pension products from regulated financial institutions.





 

Stephen Kehoe, Head of Global Financial
 Inclusion, Visa

Uttam Nayak, Group Country Manager -
 India and South Asia, Visa

 Uttam Nayak, Group Country Manager - India and South Asia, Visa, said “With a current elderly population of over 100 million that is set to nearly double within the next decade, it is imperative for India to establish an inclusive institutional architecture and encourage the workforce to set aside a part of their present incomes for their old age and other social security needs. We are delighted to partner with Micro Pension® Foundation and through the Lab we propose to create solutions that inculcate and channelize savings. The pilot truckers programme is one such example. The truck drivers and cleaners due to their nature of employment have intermittent incomes, and a concerted effort to educate them on the benefits of saving regularly for old age has been undertaken through the Lab’s financial literacy centre set up at Sanjay Gandhi Transport Nagar in Delhi. On a daily basis, 20 drivers get educated on the programme and we look forward to tracking the progress of enrolments.”


Gautam Bhardwaj, Managing Director of IIMPS and co-founder of the non-profit Micro Pension Foundation, said “As the policy and regulatory efforts with long-term micro-savings gather further momentum and begin succeeding at scale, millions of everyday Indians will need a secure and convenient mechanism to channel potentially tiny pension contributions, month after month over multiple decades, to regulated fund managers. This will directly impact both voluntary savings discipline and the amount of pension that subscribers get in their old age. Secure and well regulated technology-based, cashless payment solutions will therefore be a key ingredient for India's success with its pension reform programme. This joint research and development initiative with Visa will actively focus on this area.”

Stephen Kehoe, Head of Global Financial Inclusion, Visa said, “Everyone has the right to have access to safe and secure financial services - and the technology exists today to make this a reality.  We are excited about the potential that this partnership offers in terms of providing micro pension products in India and believe it could serve as a model for other countries.  It is a great example of how we can use Visa’s payments network and our partnerships to support a visionary pension program that the Indian government has initiated.  It also illustrates how the private sector can work collaboratively with the public sector to promote an important government initiative, which will support broader financial inclusion goals.”

The Lab has developed and launched a range of initiatives to foster financial inclusion:

Micro-payments for migrant workers: The Lab first rolled out a simple, secure, portable and affordable magnetic stripe card based micro-payment solution that enables the unbanked poor to directly transmit periodic long-term micro-savings to regulated pension and insurance product providers. Thousands of migrant workers in both urban and very remote rural locations, including home-based women workers, street venders, marginal farmers, head-loaders and small retailers are already using this mechanism to save roughly Rs. 200 a month for their old age at a negligible transaction cost.

Benefits for the financially excluded: In a significant step forward, the secure micro-payment solution, along with a set of unique financial literacy tools developed by Visa, are being used to inform, educate and encourage very poor, highly marginalized and extremely remote tribal communities in the Nilgiri mountains of India to voluntarily join a contributions-based pension and long-term micro-savings programmes. Two fully equipped retirement literacy centres were also set up with the Centre for Tribal Research and Development (CRTD) in the region. A convenient and simple micro-payment solution has resulted in a savings rate of over 85% among a population that, till barely a decade ago, did not fully comprehend or use money and relied on bartering to meet their day-to-day needs.

Financial and retirement literacy centres: Encouraged by the impact of its financial literacy and micro-payment solutions, the Lab is in the process of establishing 100 retirement literacy centres in remote locations of India in collaboration with local outreach partners such as cooperatives, rural banks and NGOs such as SEWA Bank to provide on-going education and information to micro-saving beneficiaries.

Micro-Pension for domestic help: Over 25 million poor in India are employed as domestic help (drivers, maids, cooks, gardeners, guards) in middle and upper-middle income households in India's metros and tier-1 cities. The Lab is developing an innovative e-commerce model to encourage and enable such households to educate and enrol their domestic help for an integrated social security program. Through their employers, domestic workers can have their micro-savings transferred into individual Micro-Pension® accounts online via a Visa-enabled payment gateway. In the long-term, these workers will use their own Visa-Micro Pension® prepaid cards to accelerate micro-savings into their social security accounts.