Visa partners with Micro Pension Foundation

Strengthening its commitment to becoming a partner and enabler to promote the nation’s financial inclusion agenda, Visa has announced a partnership with Micro Pension Foundation. The partnership will establish a Micro Pension Visa Financial Inclusion Lab as an incubator of innovative payment solutions, targeting 140 million low incomes, unbanked, informal sector individuals, providing them with access to affordable, micro-savings and pension products from regulated financial institutions.
 
Uttam Nayak, Group Country Manager  India and South Asia, Visa, said, We are delighted to partner with Micro Pension Foundation and through the Lab we propose to create solutions that inculcate and channelize savings. The pilot truckers programme is one such example. The truck drivers and cleaners due to their nature of employment have intermittent incomes, and a concerted effort to educate them on the benefits of saving regularly for old age has been undertaken through the Lab’s financial literacy centre set up at the Sanjay Gandhi Transport Nagar in Delhi. On a daily basis, 20 drivers get educated on the programme and we look forward to tracking the progress of enrolments.
 
The Lab is developing an innovative e-commerce model to encourage and enable such households to educate and enroll their domestic help for an integrated social security programme. Through their employers, domestic workers can have their micro-savings transferred into individual Micro-Pension accounts online via a Visa-enabled payment gateway. In the long term, these workers will use their own Visa-Micro Pension prepaid cards to accelerate micro-savings into their social security accounts.