Days of physical banks numbered: NITI CEO

“You will see a huge transformation towards digital payments by 2020. My view is that 2020 will really be the turning point,” Kant said on the opening day of the two-day Inclusive Finance India Summit here. 

“Those banks which exist in the physical world, which are unable to do good data analytics and are not working online will not survive. They will all die. So, the days of physical banks is ending and everyone will be working online. And we are just two years behind that today,” he added. 

The NITI (National Institution for Transforming India) Aayog CEO said that huge government impetus to Goods and Services Tax, e-NAM (National Agriculture Market), payment banks, point-of-sale machines and Direct Benefit Transfer scheme will lead to creation of tremendous data which would require a lot of analysis. 

“In the next two-three years, everyone will have a smartphone. The day of feature phone will be over. The cost of smartphone will have so radically fallen that everyone will have a smartphone in India. By 2020, we will have a billion people connected to Internet,” Kant said. 

He said the huge disruption caused by all these transitions would create so much credit history that credit flow would start happening on the basis of people’s digital transactions and digital record. 

“This will drive our journey towards financial inclusion and bring people above the poverty line,” he added.