Nirmala Sitharaman, the union finance minister, stated on Tuesday that efforts are being made to put into place a common Know Your Customer (KYC) system that will be utilised for a variety of financial transactions between institutions. On Tuesday, at the FICCI Leads 2022 conference, Sitharaman stated that the central KYC is handled by a central repository.
“The government is working in such a way that once a customer has given his/her KYC, it can be applied at various institutions at various times for various requirements. The customer may not have to carry out KYC check each time if the businesses are slightly different”, Sitharaman said.
The government and the regulators are working to bring it all together and bring in ease of doing business. The finance minister and financial sector regulators had discussed the issue of a common KYC process for banking, insurance, and capital markets, the minister added.
She also said that when it is implemented, a standard KYC will minimise the paperwork required for opening demat accounts, opening bank accounts, and other services.
“The value of unique payments interface (UPI) transactions crossed ₹10.62 lakh crore in July through 6.28 billion transactions. In the last fiscal, more than 46 billion transactions were processed, amounting to over ₹84.17 lakh crores,” she said.
“The UPI’s own target is a billion transactions per day in next five years,” Sitharaman.