New Delhi

While urban India continues to reap the benefits of digital transactions such as discounts, cashback, vouchers, and coupon codes, Rural India, which forms nearly 70 per cent of the entire population, struggles to open even a bank account.

The rural-urban divide continues to present a nationwide challenge. While organisations have woken up to focus on penetrating rural India for its holistic and all-round development, there is still a long road ahead for digitization and financial inclusion in such areas. In this attempt, Payworld, an initiative of the Sugal & Damani group of companies, has been working towards bridging the divide and establishing last-mile connectivity at multiple touchpoints.

Payworld offers various Financial Services through their platforms to rural India. The company's retail outlets assist the rural population in providing financial services like Domestic Money Transfer, Aadhar enabled Payments, Micro ATM services, Micro Insurance and Loans. Similar to the concept of ATMs, Payworld allows the village people to use Aadhar enabled Payment system (AePS) or mATM to withdraw money received as DBT from nearby Payworld retailers. Payworld is going all out in ensuring that the government's plan of financial inclusion of rural India is well laid out and executed, informs Praveen Dhabhai, COO, Payworld.

With 54 per cent of India's population having access to smartphones as of 2020, people are gradually learning to pay using a QR code or UPI but financial transactions such as booking a ticket, net banking, buying insurance, and investing are still far-fetched dreams, especially for rural India, which is still needs assistance to do such financial transactions. Thus, Payworld's retailer network spread across rural areas of length and breadth of India enables people to have access and assists them in providing all the above financial services through the Payworld platform.

Additionally, Payworld is a company of choice for many banks, telcos, insurance, and lending companies to give them access to our large consumer base in an omnichannel format. The company's initiative, Payworld Money is an RBI-approved PPI (Pre-Paid Instrument–Digital/Mobile wallet) and is being used to provide Domestic Money remittance, and it plans to provide Rupay Card, NETC Fasttag, and other services allowed to offer as a PPI issuer.

Moreover, PayWorld has 78 per cent retailers in rural areas and just about 22 per cent in urban areas, which indicates the company's commitment towards sustainable and all-around development of India. Payworld's various initiatives for reducing the rural and urban divide is providing financial services by "phygital" way to the rural population, use of best-in-class technology to develop robust Digital Platform for retailers to do assisted transactions, use of Data analytics, and AI-enabled BOT to provide services to Retailers and Consumers, assist aspiring consumers to open digital wallet accounts and make online payments for hassle-free online e-commerce transactions.

Payworld is part of Sugal & Damani Group, a USD 2 billion conglomerate having a presence in Technology, Real Estate, and Gaming apart from Fintech/ Financial Services. Sugal and Damani Group is helmed by its Directors Prasan Jain, Nitesh Damani, and Mitul Damani. Flagging off its operations in 2006, PayWorld has built a formidable presence in India with over 5,00,000 active retail touchpoints across 630 districts and 28 states, providing access to new market segments to the service providers.

Payworld builds on the business philosophy of "Making Life Simple", offering innovative solutions by their intelligent electronic transaction processing platform where a consumer can do financial transactions by visiting retail touchpoints by paying cash. These retail points use Payworld's Platform and application which runs on Desktops, Laptops, and Mobile phones using Android.

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