Telenor India has deployed e-KYC based SIM activation facility across its six circles, announces the company. Now the e-KYC facility is available at 700 stores of Telenor. This will soon expanded to 2000 stores by the end of November.
Speaking at the launch of the e-KYC facility, Upanga Dutta, Chief Marketing Officer, Telenor India said, “We are very excited about rolling out e-KYC as this heralds a new era of digitalization and is a step forward in making Digital India a reality. This is in line with our ambition of becoming the preferred partner in the digital life of our customers. In a mobile first country, e-KYC reinforces our commitment to make mobile services simple and easy by using innovative technology solutions.”
E-KYC is the electronic customer verification process. This allows Telenor to quickly verify the subscriber’s credentials and activate a Telenor mobile connection. For e-KYC verification, the customer need to present the copy of his Aadhar (or just the Aadhar number/e- Aadhar copy) followed by biometric verification at the Telenor store. E-KYC enables the operator to match the customer’s credentials with the UIDAI database. This process will eliminate the hassles of telephone verification and hence the waiting time for new connection is greatly reduced.
Telenor plans to extend the facilities to 10,000 Point-of-Sales and take the services to mass market customer subsequently.
Telenor India has commercial operations in UP (West), UP (East), Bihar (including Jharkhand), Andhra Pradesh (including Telangana), Maharashtra (including Goa) and Gujarat. In these areas, Telenor is the fourth largest operator both in revenue and customer market share. The operator has over 53 million subscriptions from the six circles.
According to a study by development consulting firm MicroSave, Aadhaar enabled e-KYC process for customer acquisition will allow Indian telecom operators and banks to save Rs. 10,000 crores over the next five years. Apart from substantial cost savings for banks and financial institutions, Aadhaar enabled e-KYC is significantly more efficient compared to current paper-based KYC, the study had said.
