I walked into a tiny kirana store today in Whitefield Bangalore and in 5 minutes got myself a Reliance Jio SIM connection - here's a video of the KYC process using Aadhaar eKYC! As you can see, I actually goofed up twice (and have not edited those out deliberately) but got it right the third time - and it still took all of 41 seconds!!!

eKYC was an idea I had the privilege of working on and it sure gave me goosebumps to see it working quite flawlessly at the Kirana store. About six-years ago, after I had left mChek, I had the privilege of spending time as a full-time volunteer with Nandan Nilekani, Pramod Varma and the Aadhaar team. Given that the platform was still being conceived, this was one of the most exciting projects one could be a part of.

During that time along with Kiran Anandampillai, we studied the whole Telecom KYC. The statistics of the industry are stunning - at the time India was adding about 50M gross adds every month - and about 18M net adds (accounting for about 2-3% churn). that meant 1.6M SIM's a day which means more than 15 per second. That's right, by the time you read this sentence, 15 more people would get a SIM card in India!

But getting a SIM card was always an unpleasant experience - apart from the fact that it required filling up a 2-page form, submitting address proof, ID proof, 3 photographs, and essentially consuming 6-8 sheets of paper. In all cases, the required fields included Name, Address, DOB, Gender, Phone Number, Email Address & a Photograph, in addition to supporting documents. And at the end of it all, you're never sure that your ID isn't being misused to issue a SIM to the next customer who walks in. And not to mention the significant cost of then digitizing the information, warehousing the originals (estimated to be 500 Crores per year across the industry). Given that a tree produces about 80,000 sheets of paper - 1.6M KYC's at 5-sheets per means that the Telcos were consuming 1000 trees per day - or 1 Million trees every 3 years! Now THAT is stunning - especially since you probably need to plant 2-3Million trees for 1M of them to survive 5 years!!!

Compare this to Aadhaar eKYC. Walk into a store and share your Aadhaar Number and your Fingerprint on a secure device. The system then authenticates yourself with UIDAI and then, with your consent, shares your demographic data and photograph digitally and securely with the requesting Telco - via a digitally signed response that is valid in a court of law. For clarification, your BIOMETRIC DATA is NEVER SAVED - it is purely used for authentication!

No more paper, no forms to fill out, no randomly entered spelling of your name, and oh BTW, did I mention it is instantaneous!

There are a multitude of use-cases of Aadhaar - DBT, Payments, eKYC etc. - it has always been my belief that virtually each use case individually justifies the cost of the program. Whether you're doing eKYC for a bank account, telco connection, insurance policy, investment account or just employee verification, one thing is clear to me - this is the future, and we should be proud that India is blazing a new trail.

Like UPI, you really need to experience it - so go out and get a Jio Sim (To Clarify - I have no affiliation to Jio) and experience the brilliance of eKYC, and more importantly, imagine the possibilities of low-cost digital service delivery. And indeed it can help save the environment too!

#ExcitingTimes

About the Author - 

Sanjay Swamy is an Entrepreneur & Early-Stage Fintech Investor! #DigitalPayments & #Financial Services Fanatic! #IndiaStack_Evangelist!

This article was originally published on Linkedin