I’ve successfully used many products of the Aditya Birla Group. One product that is very close to my heart is BHIM app. Being introduced to this concept of UPI payment in 2014 that an infrastructure named “Immediate Payment Service” allows us to transfer money instantly between 2 bank accounts, I was intrigued. I read about this in the memorandum of the NDA government, and I found it very fascinating how they were cross-linking every project and thus read about each of these in depth.
When I introduced this concept to my family in 2016, they were all very skeptical. Having, interacted with many people in my surrounding, I came to know that they do not trust a system like this and would still rely on NEFTs rather than UPI payments. When my friends and I discussed this, we came to the consensus that this problem needs to be addressed. We tried to talk to the younger generation first because they are more open to change. We started educating them about the infrastructure and how it is very secure. With this, we were able to build a huge army in support of this UPI payments system.
Utilizing this talent pool, we started to conceptualize workshops and awareness drives for the very risk-averse people. We realized that it is not just about a lack of trust in infrastructure but also lack of skills to adapt to new technology. People do not want to switch to new technology because they are hesitant to do so, because of the trust they’ve to build with the previous technology. It was challenging to do so. With this problem being faced, On Nov 8th, 2016, Demonetization happened. Now people were very frustrated with the long queues, or time that needs to be kept as a buffer while using NEFTs. People were forced to seek alternatives. This being our biggest opportunity, we as a group decided to motivate people to use the BHIM app for their transactions, which was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Dec 30th, 2016. People have faced so many problems with the money supply were forced to listen to us. More people started attending our workshop and seminars organized in the colonies, schools, and societies. They were now open to change. With such great responses, the people in our group also got motivated.
With this, word of mouth came into play. People started trusting this more, and a general perception about this technology was changed successfully.
We were able to impact the 100s of people directly and 1000s of people indirectly.
Bharat Interface for Money is a mobile payment app which was launched by Prime minister Narendra Modi on 30th Nov 2016. It is named after Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, and It intends to ease the payments directly through banks as part of Indian Banknote demonetization, 2016.
With this, we all realized that the first step is the most difficult and crucial one. If you have taken the first step, you’ll eventually figure out the path ahead.