Humbl and Digital India Payments partner to extend biometric financial services across country

U.S. fintech Humbl and Digital India Payments Limited (DIPL) have formed a strategic partnership to deliver mobile payments and financial services to the country, including facial recognition or thumbprint biometrics for simplified banking, financial and government services.

The Humbl Mobile App will be provided to allow customers to send, receive and exchange money, and pay bill or merchants. Humbl Hubs will provide physical agent locations with Humbl Mobile Pay and the Humbl POS tablet at 30,000 DIPL retail locations in a variety of urban and rural settings with different degrees of connectivity, according to the announcement.

Humbl Hubs locations will offer a range of walk-in services varying by location, including cash pickup, foreign exchange, fair lending, bill payments, pre-paid cards, store credits, travel bookings, internet and cell phone minutes.

“HUMBL is doing to global financial services what UBER did to the local taxi markets,” said Hari Prasath, Managing Director of DIPL. “Delivering high quality financial services by pairing local consumers and merchants together through mobile technology, anywhere in the world.”

“Our younger Indian customers don’t want to visit multiple service branches to wait in long lines, pay expensive fees and highly variable rates,” continued Prasath. “HUMBL gives them mobile financial services – faster, cheaper and in nearby locations.”

Humbl and DIPL will work together to support the Indian government’s “Smart Grid” programs, which use biometrics for simplified services at Humbl Hubs.

Brian Foote, Humbl CEO, notes that the 375 million users of Apple Pay are far from the total addressable market of digital payment services, and claims Humbl was built to serve the planet’s other 7 billion people, who use a very different grid.

“We’re honored to partner with a proven operator like DIPL for channel distribution in the region. We look forward to putting HUMBL® technologies to work for 1.4 billion India customers alongside them,” says Foote.

He says that in many emerging markets the cost of sending and exchanging money is in the 10 to 20 percent range, and that short-term loans can exceed 30 percent.

“HUMBL is working to cut those costs in half, while saving customers billions of dollars at scale and getting more people into the India tax base at the same time,” Foote comments.

The government of India has been considering new requirements including multi-factor authentication (MFA) for digital payments to encourage the use of technology like biometrics to increase trust and security.

Article Topics

banking  |  biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  financial services  |  fingerprint biometrics  |  government services  |  India  |  mobile app  |  partnerships