Joysticks for Social Growth - Mobile Loans
http://www.ekgaon.com/sunday_times
06th December, 2009, New Delhi
Vijay Pratap Singh, who runs ekgaon technologies that helps in providing a gamut of services to villages. "For us, a village is not just the smallest civilized habitation of people, but a co-hesive socio-economic unit" he says.
How Singh's model works in interesting. Ekgaon has tie-ups with microfinance insititutions that provides loans to farmers. Field agents of these insititutions are provided mobile phones, equipped with a properiatary application called "OneMobile" developed by ekgaon. This application allows transactions such as loan payment, insurance premium collection etc, and comes woth a bluetooth printer. After the amount is collected from the farmer, a printed reciept is given to him. Information of this transaction is then sent over a secired network to ekgaon's server. The server integrates the transaction received from mobiles into the accounting and portfolio management system, which helps finance managers of the respective institutions to manage field operations in real-time, thus saving costs.