Walk in with an Aadhar card, walk out with an activated Vodafone mobile connection

Vodafone has announced that prospective Vodafone customers will soon be able to walk into a Vodafone store with their Aadhar number and walk out with an activated prepaid or postpaid SIM. The service will be available from 24 August onwards and will be available at around 4,500 Vodafone Stores and Vodafone Mini Stores across the country. Not all stores will be able to provide the service. A customer only needs to provide his Aadhar number and fingerprint in order to avail themselves of this service. A Vodafone app will help retailers activate customers using e-KYC, ushering in an era of paperless SIM card activation. Vodafone claims that the service will be rolled out to all official Vodafone stores in September. Sandeep Kataria, Director – Commercial, Vodafone India said, “We are all set to delight customers with the benefits of the e-KYC led paperless process.  Customers walking in for a new connection at our stores will walk out talking in just a few minutes. We had partnered with the Department of Telecom (DoT) to pilot the AADHAR based e-KYC solutions in and tested it successfully in two circles. Effective Wednesday, 24th August, we are rolling it out across the country. The use of e-KYC will drastically cut down on delays in activating new connections because of infrastructure challenges like power cuts, transporting volumes of paper, lack of photocopying and photography facilities. It will also strengthen the verification process as there will be no room for any manual error.”