FINO TATKAAL, an initiative developed and implemented by Financial Information Network & Operations Ltd. (FINO), has been voted as the best Financial Inclusion Initiative of the Year and awarded the Jury Choice category at the recently held eINDIA Awards 2010.

The eINDIA Awards 2010 have been instituted by the Department of Information Technology, Government of India for e-Gov ICT (Information and Communication Technology) to recognize the achievements in the field of implementing e-Governance in India.

Mr. Manish Khera, CEO – FINO said, “It a great honour for all of us at FINO to receive this award. e-India is one among the most prestigious awards in the country that an Indian company can aspire for its overall business excellence. This award is recognizes our relentless efforts to support the Government’s Financial Inclusion efforts and extend convenient and low cost banking facilities to all unbanked. The award will also work as a catalyst for us at FINO to work harder and take banking down to the very grassroots in India.”

FINO TATKAAL provides customers with access to formal banking facilities, by opening a savings bank account and provides them remittance facility by opening a formal no – frills bank A/C by accepting a minimum reduced KYC documents.

FINO TATKAAL uses smart cards and bio-metric fingerprints to ensure safe and secure transactions thereby allaying a customer’s ignorance and fear of formal banking formalities. The biometric set up enables cashless and paperless transactions through smartcard by only verifying through his/her fingerprint and gets paid electronically. FINO TATKAAL facilitates remittance from one bank account to another bank account (Card-to-Bank Account; Card-to-Card and Cash-to-Card).

FINO TATKAAL was launched at Dharavi, Mumbai in association with Union Bank of India as an offshoot product of the larger Financial Inclusion (FI) implementation to provide door step banking facilities to the un-banked and under-banked migrants who have come to the city in search of livelihood. These migrant customers do not have bank A/C and neither do they have the requisite KYC documents by which they can open an account and hence have to queue for long durations at bank branch premises to remit money to their dependents back home.

FINO has been successful in enrolling more than 1.6million families (approximately 5 Crore people) in a span of two years and has been implemented at 40 other locations across Mumbai and another 40 points will be added in this fiscal. Apart from Mumbai, at Delhi too the product has been launched at 60 points, also 10 more remitter destinations will be started in this FY on the same model.