Demonetisation: CashNoCash helps find ATMs, banks and post offices with cash availability

When the going gets tough, the startup community in Bangalore decides to go ahead and offer quick solution with a free, voluntary service to help citizens. We are talking about CashNoCash , a website that went live on 14 November to help people find cashpoints nearest to them, and not restricted to a particular service provider. Conceptualised and designed by Manjunath Talwar and Abhijit Khasnis, who are Quikrites and co-founders of Hiree. It’s a crowd-sourced site that is being supported by Quikr and Nasscom. Talwar tells tech2 that the site was developed to help people avoid waiting in ATMs that are devoid of cash or has an extremely long queue. It is mainly to help people who prefer transactions with cash and are yet not comfortable or acquainted with cards. Citing an example, he explained how a driver was worried about paying his EMI after an unsuccessful attempt after standing in the queue for three hours.  Atul Tewari, COO, Quikr said, “The sheer volume of transactions has led to long queues at banks and ATMs and CashNoCash helps citizens find the nearest cash point with the shortest waiting time. The site offers a simple technology based solution that empowers people with information and I’m excited that a team of Quikrites has helped make this happen." CashNoCash is a crowd-sourced site that allows anyone to update the status of the bank, ATM or post office they are visiting or in their vicinity, including members associated with that bank, post office and so on. In fact, Talwar says the idea was to get help from banks, services associated with the ATM and so on for real time updates. “We checked with all service providers including banks and others first if they could help offer the data, but that didn’t seem like a workable model,” he explained. Most providers denied as they’ve been very busy and have no bandwidth to help, and hence the website is crowdsourced. “The scale of problem is humongous. The government and financial institutions are doing everything they can. This is our team’s effort to help the cause by using technology and knowledge of the crowd,” he added. Talwar tells us that the site went live on 14 November, but started gaining traction yesterday with about 20,000 ATMs, banks and post offices, the site faced some crashes too. It is a voluntary work and more helpers would always help. So, how does CashNoCash work? You can go to the website, and either let the site pick your location or simply enter a PIN code to lookup for ATM/banks in that particular area. The list of banks will appear with an icon on the left side against each bank showing whether there is a long wait time, queue or cash availability. On choosing a specific bank, it also lets you update the current status such as if there is cash, long queue or availability, accordingly. You can also create an alert by keying in your email ID or notifications about cashpoints in your vicinity.