Technology Enables Co-Operative Banks To Access 67,000 ATMs

InfrasoftTech has enabled its Core Banking customers to now access over 67,000 ATMs available on the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) network. The solution integrates the bank’s ATM switch with NPCI, facilitating routing of ATM transactions through inter-connectivity between the banks’ switches. Thereby, allowing customers of the co-operative banks to access the entire ATM network with the convenience of banking ‘any time any where’ across India, including withdrawing cash, checking account balance and changing PIN number.

Five of InfrasoftTech’s prominent customers, Abhyudaya Cooperative Bank, Kalyan Janata Sahakari Bank, Punjab & Maharashtra Cooperative Bank, Thane Janata Shakari Bank and Dombivli Nagari Sahakari Bank are connected to NPCI network. This allows their end users to get same level of services from their co-operative banks as they would have from any of the nationalised or private banks.

To open up the market for small and medium co-operative banks other than nationalized and private banks, Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) initiated a programme to launch National Finance Switch (NFS) with an objective to make ATM deployment more economical and viable for banks. In December 2009, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) took over the operations of NFS from IDRBT. NPCI connects directly to the individual bank’s switch or through their shared ATM Network Switch. As of December 2010, NPCI covers 52 member banks with over 67,000 ATMs.

The critical factor is that if the underlying technology that the banks are using is able to link to the NPCI network then this would mean that millions of all co-operative banking customers are empowered to access the entire ATM network.

“We are currently working with all our co-operative bank customers which is numbering to about 100 banks nationally in bringing them on the NPCI network,” said Hanuman Tripathi, Group Managing Director, InfrasoftTech. “This is a huge contribution that technology has made to empower co-operative banks take on their big brothers,” he further added.