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NEWS India Post plans 650 extra branches T
he Indian government is planning to roll out payments functionality across its 155,000 post offices branches, as well as setting up 650 new branches of India Post Bank.
Minister for communications, Manoj Singh, said that the Indian postal service is undergoing a major transformation, including the provision of interoperable ATMs and new banking services to the rural population of India.
According to stats from First Post, there is one post office for every 7,000 people in India, while more than 85% of its locations are in rural areas. Twenty-two million people already receive rural employment payments through the service. India Post is also, by deposits, one of the largest cash-holders in the country, with more than 6 billion rupees. It’s second only to the State Bank of India.
India Post has been waiting a long time for the green light to set up its own bank. It originally planned to start offering services in March 2014 as part of an enterprise-wide transformation fuelled by Infosys’ Finacle core system. But following a number of lengthy delays, it was only given the go ahead to start processing payments in 2017.
Finacle was selected by the company following a process that began in 2010 and was charged with turning post offices across India into ‘mini banks’ catering to an average of 7,000 customers each. The project, which cost around $125.3 million, had an initial completion date of July 2014.
India Post encountered a number of stumbling blocks, however, most notably when the country’s finance ministry opposed the banking services plan in February 2014, claiming the company did not have the necessary expertise to become a bank proper.
Ageing data – with some tables up to 100 years old – and a worry about Post Bank customers and tellers being confused with the modern Finacle system were among other pressing concerns.
The Reserve Bank of India has since brought about the reversal of the finance ministry’s decision and come out in favour of the plans. India Post has already run a number of pilot projects in Assam, Uttar, Pradesh and Maharashtra to test the capabilities of its new system.
Payment problems for Romania O
ver a quarter of invoices issued in Romania are either late or not paid at all, according to a new report into European payment patterns, carried out by TNS and
commissioned by EOS.
The study shows that 23% of invoices are paid late, while 4% are never paid at all.
However, these rates are barely above the average for the region, which is 25%. Poland and the Czech Republic have up to 80% of payments sent on time.
In the past few years, the time it takes payments in Romania to be made has been gradually reduced to 39 days (from 41) for B2B payments, compared with 37 days in the Czech Republic and 36 in Poland.
This, however, doesn’t solve the fact that 4% of invoices in the country are never paid, the highest in the region. Even one unpaid invoice signifies trouble for many companies, with 17% claiming that it impacts their ability to stay in business.
80% of Romanian companies claim that late payments force them to delay payments themselves, and over two thirds rely on lines of credit from suppliers, far higher than any neighbouring country. In Bulgaria for example, less than half need to rely on credit to keep afloat. The use of debt recovery services has fallen from 44% to 41% in Europe. However, in Romania, it has risen from 40% to 46%.
“Comparing results from previous years, it is clear that setting shorter due dates leads to a better payment rate,” said Georg Kovacs, the manager of EOS in Romania.
www.ibsintelligence.com | © IBS Intelligence 2017
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