​ Chief Ministers' panel demands more user friendly version of cashless transactions

The Chief Ministers' panel on digital payments has asked government to roll out from December 25 a more user friendly version of USSD or *99#, which is used on feature mobile phones for making cashless payments as cash crunch due to demonetisation continues, as per an agency news report.

"Upgraded version of USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) should be rolled out by December 25, 2016," suggested the panel on adoption of digital payments in its recommendation submitted to the Finance Ministry.

According to an official statement today, the panel, whose convener is Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, has suggested that the procedure for simplified Know Your Customer (KYC) using Aadhaar needs to be adopted.

The second meeting of the committee was held on Friday at NITI Aayog.

The meeting followed the deliberations held by Naidu, Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog Arvind Panagariya with the Governor and senior management of RBI and CMDs of major private and public sector banks on Thursday in Mumbai.

The Maharashtra government informed the meeting that it was introducing an Aadhaar Bill in the legislative assembly to give legal status to the use of Aadhaar number for various purposes.

It also informed that it had launched a major campaign to promote digital transactions.

Madhya Pradesh reported that it had initiated a major programme to digitise the transactions in state-owned mundies.

Odisha pointed out that the state was deficient in financial infrastructure including bank branches, bank correspondent, Internpenetration and mobile phones.

While noting that RBI and banks are largely supportive of the measures to promote digital transactions, the panel suggested steps including easing the digital payment operations at the level of merchant.

It said that UIDAI would shortly roll out the common Android-based Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AEPS) application developed in collaboration with TCS that can be downloaded by the merchants.

In order to use this application for carrying out cashless transactions, merchants will need a smartphone and a fingerprint scanner.

Transactions on this application can be done without any card or PIN. The application would be made available to all banks and the banks would encourage merchants in their vicinity to adopt this application, it said.

The panel suggested that RBI should allow authentication through iris scanner and One Time Password (OTP) for AEPS and there should be no charge on AEPS transactions.