Since the announcement of demonetisation of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 notes, commercial establishments, retail outlets, and small-scale vendors are looking at various options for customers to make payments without any hindrance.
Several options that are becoming popular are online transfer, pre-paid cards, use of credit or debit cards and mobile wallets. Banks are promoting their online and mobile banking facilities. Be it cab drivers or roadside vendors, many are starting to explore these options as they face shortage of cash, especially of smaller denominations.
However, customers who need cash for daily purchases and payments are finding it difficult to withdraw the required money as ATMs are not operating in most places and banks are unable to meet the entire fund requirement of the customers who want to withdraw cash.
In an effort to help the public locate the nearest ATMs with cash, several crowd sourced tools have been introduced. cashnocash.com is one such popular tool. When the pincode is typed by a user, it lists the nearby ATMs and also says whether these have cash or not. The users can update the site based on their experience at the ATM.
Another is ATMBot, developed by Coimbatore-based start-up Timebender Technologies. Within 48 years of launch, 6,000 customers were served and so far about 15,000. In this too, the information is crowd-sourced.
The users withdraw cash and click a button on ATMBot, a web robot that runs inside Facebook’s messenger, to say whether the ATM had cash or not. The data is real-time, says its CEO Abishek.
(Reporting by
M. Soundariya Preetha)
