Mobikwik partners with NGO Samagra to promote savings among slum dwellers

Aiming to provide the urban slum dwellers with ICT-enabled mobile wallets and promote a savings behaviour, payments company Mobikwik has partnered with NGO Samagra.

Mrinal Sinha, the COO of Mobikwik, told ET, “Once the money is digitised, then Samagra would potentially look at providing other services on top of this, like mobile recharge, bill payments and access through products and services through e-commerce.”

Currently, the slum dwellers hand over their money to Samagra for savings. Under the new system, the money will continue to be handed over to a Samagra representative, but would then reflect in the persons Mobikwik wallet, or micro gullak (piggybank), as it is being called.

Swapnil Chaturvedi, CEO of Samagra also detailed about Samagra’s community toilet programme. The ladies in charge of managing these toilets will act as agents and help people in opening Mobikwik accounts.

“We had our own wallet for the last two years but needed to reach out to more people. Many of these people are daily labourers and they leave for work — and return — outside of a bank’s working hours. This way, they can save money with us which they can use to access various services through Mobikwik,” said Chaturvedi.

There is currently a pilot being run in Pune with 15,000 users and intends to reach out to 50,000 micro-savers by the end of the year. Deposits can range from Rs 2 to Rs 200 a day. While this is the first such initiative for Mobikwik, Sinha said they are keen on partnering with other NGOs to provide similar services.

Sinha says, “The bottom of the pyramid needs to be served differently, and we can’t turn down deposits saying the amount is too small. We are not looking at this as a billion-dollar business opportunity, but a way to serve the people.”

Most slum dwellers end up accumulating their savings at home or with a self-help group. There are over 100 million people living in urban slums in India, many of whom have no access to banking facilities.

Chaturvedi said most women in this segment tend to save money in a hole in the ground or in a jar and often end up forgetting where they had stored it.