Rural Banking in India

An article in the Times of India today describes a pilot project to design a low cost delivery banking model for rural customers. There is a huge underserved market in India for rural banking services, and the lack of existing banking infrastructure in many areas presents unique challenges.

Saastha Infotech, a software company in Bangalore that focuses on the banking and financial services markets, has designed and developed a Rural Credit Rating system that helps banks calculate and manage credit ratings for rural customers, and their Rural Credit Rating system is part of this project.

My good friend Vinod Chandran, whom I met at the Office 12 Ascend developer workshop in Bangalore a few months ago, works for Saastha and was the one who went to Honawar to install the credit rating system for this pilot project. Vinod is doing some creative work with the 2007 Microsoft Office System and related technologies such as workflow. Keep up the great work, Vinod, and best of luck to everyone involved in this interesting project!