How an Institution can become an AUA (Authentication User Agency) with UIDAI?

Getting enrolled with UIDAI will enable organizations to provide E-KYC and Aadhaar based authentication. Becoming an AUA (Authentication User Agency) is required for any Institution which is looking to use Aadhaar authentication. It is also requisite step in registering as KYC User Agency (KUA) for using the Aadhaar eKYC service, the instantaneous pre-ratified Aadhaar based KYC solution.

How India Governments Direct Cash Benefit Transfer works?

What is India Governments Direct Cash Benefit Transfer? How it is better for India if it gives cash transfer instead of food/fertilizer subsidies.

Here is a good example.

Assume One kg of rice is approx Rs.25 in the market.
Let's say the farmer sells it to the Retailer at Rs.10 approximately.
But, government's Food Corporation of India (FCI) procures it for its PDS (Public Distribution System) at MSP (Minimum Support Price) of Rs.15 approximately.
(Note the Rs.5 loss to the govt)
And then, sells the same rice at its ration shops for Rs. 15 approximately.
(Note the Rs.10 loss from the market)

Now, the govt has given a subsidy of  Rs.15. This is 2.25 lakh crore subsidy per year approximately for the entire nation. 

But, the complications start when intermediaries divert the rice from PDS to open market. (Note the Rs.10 profit they can make). Adding to that the inefficiency costs of govt - salaries to PDS employees, bureaucratic complications, go-downs wastage, trucks, transport,  etc.
On top of this, corruption at ration shops, ghost cards, invisible beneficiaries etc. It is seen that more than 40% of these grains do not reach the final beneficiary.

So, the govt is paying a whopping 2.25 lakh crore and it is inefficient. On top of it, it benefits the corrupt people, and moreover, it does not benefit the ones in need.

If the beneficiary, had a bank account, with one click, the govt could have transferred the subsidy of  Rs.15 that it anyway gives, and the poor person could have directly bought from the market. This would ensure that the govt would not involve in the PDS, MSP system, no go-downs, no transport, no ration shops setting, no bureaucrats needed, no corruption, no ghost ID cards, nothing.

Moreover, since all the food grains are available in the market (and not procured by the govt.) the price would drop drastically. So, the beneficiary gets all his money electronically, lesser price in the market, more options to buy from without any govt inefficiency or corruption at all.

This should be the ideal system, where subsidies are given without any human interference at all. This is why all people need a bank account. So the program Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana aims to get bank accounts to every citizen in India. For faster enrollments of bank accounts, banks / other financial institutions use Aadhaar based E-KYC solution.

Do you think this new system is good for us? Share us your thoughts.

Instant mobile connection activation using Aadhaar cards

Imagine walking into a store empty-handed and walks out with a working new mobile connection. That is going to be a reality soon if you have an Aadhaar card. Even the physical presence of the Aadhaar card is not required, just the UID number is enough. Telecom ministry was asked to work with Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) by PM Narendra Modi to make this a reality as soon as possible.

Now there are a high number of cases of people use someone else’s identity papers to get SIM card from an unauthorized person. This is called identity theft. By using Aadhaar card to verify identity by checking the persons bio-metric linked with the provided UID will prevent it.
The officials said the telecom companies were willing to implement E-KYC solution and install bio-metric readers with their vendors to provide online authentication of a person having an Aadhaar number.

Proclaimed Financial Inclusion affected by unwanted complexity

In recent times, the government of India putting great efforts to bring financial inclusion to everyone. This has to happen through banks and other financial institutions.  The key to this is the usage of unique id to operate bank accounts as well as other services. For this to happen the service provider institutions has to enroll as AUA(Authentication User Agency) and KUA(KYC User Agency) with the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India). This enrollment is mandatory because this enables UIDAI to make sure that only relevant organization can provide E-KYC and Aadhaar based authentication and prevent the miss use of the system.

India Government all set to embrace bio-metric technology for cash transfers

Imagine walking into an ATM with empty handed (without any card) and does the withdrawal using bio-metric authentication and walks out with cash. Yes, no more passwords/pins. That's the future going to be. Imagine a world where you don't have to remember any passwords...that's what gonna happen if UID bio-metric authentication becomes a standard everywhere.

Last Saturday Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the government was keen on using the biometric technology to "stop leakages" in different welfare schemes. Bank accounts will be linked to both Aadhaar and NPR for cash transfers. The finance ministry has been directed to work out a mechanism for linking NPR to bank accounts.

What this means Aadhaar authentication and E-KYC is the need of the hour for institutions who deal with the public. 

How we choose iPhone5 as the grand prize for our predict IPL champions campaign?

We were planning to launch our new product Report Bazaar. Report Bazaar provides customized research report service sourced from different stock brokers. We decided to have a campaign associated with the launch. As its the cricket carnival IPL (Indian Premier League) season we decided to make it as a contest to predict the IPL champions this year. We are planning to give out a smartphone as the grand prize to the one lucky subscriber who joins during the campaign period. So to decide on the grand prize we asked our fellow friends and fans this simple question.

Which smartphone do you want to win?

The choices on our mind were,

• Samsung Galaxy S5
• Apple iPhone 5c
• Moto X
• Nokia Lumia
• HTC One Max

There were recommendations from many people on each phone. Some even suggested to give away cheaper phones so the number of prizes can be increased. Considering all opinions we decided to consider iPhone5c as the prize. The main factor favoring the decision was the aspirational value the brand brings to the mind of people.

We need to wait and see how people are responding to this. Please do check out Report Bazaar.

How we resolved email delivery issue when MX record got ignored by some mail servers?

We had a strange email delivery issue, some emails to our corporate email account where not getting delivered when sent from some email domains. Some of them who faced the issue called us when they didn't get a reply to their emails. We don't want this to happen with our clients or prospects who are trying to contact us. As being a technology company we could not allow this to happen and took it up a challenge that we needed to fix ASAP.

We have our static site running on Amazon S3 and have set up a CNAME record to cover the domain so that we can have the URL of http://mydomain.com (note that I am replacing our real domain with mydomain.com throughout this).  The request coming to http://www.mydomain.com was redirected to http://mydomain.com.

The issue is that sometimes when an email sends to [email protected], the domain part gets replaced with s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com during the domain name resolution process.

NASSCOM hackathon and birth of our mobile app based on Aadhaar Auth and E-KYC

A few weeks back we got an invitation from NASSCOM for Hack-a-Fin hackathon to be held in Bangalore. It was aimed at companies working in the Financial domain and us surely one of them. NASSCOM has partnered with Yodlee for making this happen. Seeing this as an opportunity to meet fellow people working on Financial products I decided to go there. Meanwhile, my erstwhile colleague Nithin was also planning to attend the event. So we decided to hack the event together.  It turned out to be an interesting event.

PAN and KYC Challenges of Stock Broking Firms

Stockbroking business in India is facing various challenges due to the global slowdown, low industrial growth, high inflation, coalition government etc. Amid all these challenges they are facing other regulatory hurdles from the SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India). The most important among them is the mandatory PAN card norm. As per regulation from SEBI, every customer of a broking firm should have a PAN card.  What does this mean to the broker?

Aadhaar cards - Something more than LPG subsidies

The latest buzz among people is about Aadhaar cards and subsidies associated with it.
Let's try to understand what Aadhaar card really is and what are its benefits.

Aadhaar provides every individual residing in India with a Unique Identification Number (UID). It is issued to individuals of any age including children and its purpose is to establish identities of people residing in India and it is NOT a citizenship card. So this means any person residing in India including foreign nationals can get an Aadhaar card. Given below are the important facts about Aadhaar.

Identity Proof: The Aadhaar Card works as the identity proof with relevant details of an individual written on the card. It acts as both identity proof as well as address proof. The only other document that acts as both identity and address proof is Passport and some driving licenses. So this prevents the need for multiple documents for the common man to prove who he is.

Eliminates Paper proofs: The data is available electronically and is exposed via APIs, this eliminates the need to copy the data on paper for logistic or storage purpose. Govt organizations and business houses can use this to identify and authenticate people. This means you can walk into a bank empty-handed and open a bank account by just telling them your Aadhar number.  A govt organizations/ bank/business house will get detailed data only if the individual allows them to do so. The authentication is validated byways such as OTP (One Time Pin), Biometric data etc. This prevents people from taking sim cards, opening bank accounts using forged documents.

Financial Inclusion: Usually the poor in the country had no identity proofs which prevented them from availing various services like PDS, bank accounts and various other benefits that demanded identity proof. Making Aadhaar number available to every Indian will make sure that the poor sections get the benefits welfare schemes they qualify too.

On the Spot Service: Aaadhar data can be accessed from handheld devices too. This means govt can distribute wages or subsidy or ration to people in a remote location directly. Aaadhaar authentication if implemented across the service delivery process/supply chain will help curb leakages and diversions, and help identify bottlenecks in delivery.

Universality: The Aadhaar card provides an individual with one identity that he can use to identify himself throughout the country. It provides the state migrants with the mobility of their identities.

Prevents Duplicity: The Aadhaar Card provides each individual with a unique identification number, which is provided by a system that is wholly computerized and centralized. The Aadhaar number is linked with biometric information of the person like the fingerprints and retinal information. This eliminates the problem of duplication.

Hope this article helped you in getting an idea about Aaadhar cards. Feel free to write to us with your thoughts and comments on this.

Capstocks features us (Finahub Kinship platform ) on Capstocks Infoline publication.

We are very glad to let you know that, our invaluable customer Capstocks has featured us in their publication Capstocks Infoline. It went on say "Finahub Kinship platform is a unique service that enables us to email relevant research reports and investment advice to the clients. With its report category and user subscription features, Finahub helps Cap stocks to customize its research report service to the needs and wants of the individual customer."

We thank Cap stocks for giving us the opportunity to provide our services.

How to make sure your bulk / transaction email reaches your users?

Here we are going to talk about how you can improve the email delivery to your clients. Business houses use various services to send emails. But none of them are guaranteed to be delivered to the inbox of the clients. We need to make sure your emails are not reaching user's SPAM bin.

Following are some steps which will definitely improve your email deliverability.

Send emails from your domain itself 
Never ever use Gmail, Hotmail or any generic domain to send emails to clients. Yeah, many will be tempted to do so as they are free. There is a good chance your email getting marked as spam if you try sending too many emails from this kind of personal email domains. Also, there are some limits set by the service provider which will limit the number of emails you can send in a given day. Choose a bulk email provider and configure your domain with them.