Need of biometric atms in rural areas: A reference to Hassan District

Facilitating Financial Accessibility to Indian rural mass is one of the effective strategic tools in achieving financial inclusion, rural development, minimizing regional imbalance and sustainable growth. To include the financially excluded segments of the society into the fold of formal financial system, many innovative and advanced financial channels were being created in relatively unbanked, under served, remote and rural areas. The Banking industry has experiencing several significant trends from many years. The technology adaptation in Financial Inclusion process has offered many strategic benefits to the banks in terms of achieving efficiency, control of operations, productivity and profitability. And it has also enabled the customers to get access to banking services from anywhere, anytime according to their convenience. Despite of major reforms in financial services delivery, the rural and village customers are not been able to access to these advanced financial channels. The Technological adaptation is becoming limited usage in these regions. This is due to the problems of Illiteracy among rural people, lack of awareness about the technology based banking services, lack of exposure towards these new services, traditional mindset, lack of trust towards these new services, security issues. Hence, this research paper aimed at exploring the concept of Financial Inclusion, its role in rural development, Channels of Rural Financial Inclusion & its limitations. This paper also focused on examining the rural banking customer's awareness towards various banking services, their most preferred services, associated problems with ATM services and the need of Biometrics based ATMs (Automatic Teller Machines) in overcoming the problems. For this study, the primary data was collected from 200 rural customers through a structured questionnaire. The collected data was analyzed according to the objectives of the present research. This research revealed that the rural ATM card holders expecting Biometrics ATMs for their financial transactions.