Bharti Airtel extends hand to Stellapps to help small dairy farmers

Airtel Payments Bank, a digital finance arm of Bharti Airtel will now be helping Stellapps, one of the leading dairy startups in India, with providing banking services to small dairy farmers across the country. Stellapps offers holistic financial management programs across the dairy value chain, with special programs designed to improve financial inclusion for dairy farmers through its mooPay FinTech Platform. Stellapps has been closely working with dairies and their milk collection centers to enable direct payments to the bank account of the dairy farmers. However, a significant challenge for farmers has been the long travel to reach the nearest ATM or bank branch for withdrawing the payments.

Airtel Payments Bank will now onboard the new partner milk collection centers of Stellapps as banking points. With milk collection centers operating as a banking point, farmers and other residents in the neighbourhood will no longer have to travel long distances. Through these banking points, they will be able to open a bank account, withdraw and deposit cash, earn interest on savings, access Aadhaar Enabled Payments, get government pension schemes, and make bill payments.

Onboarding of the centers as banking points will happen in a phased manner. Through this collaboration, both entities aim to provide easy access to formal banking services to over one million small dairy farmers from around the country.

The partner ecosystem has been piloted in Uttar Pradesh (Varanasi & Kanpur) and Madhya Pradesh (Gwalior). Over 120 milk collection centers are now also operating as Banking Points.

mooPay enabled milk collection centers not only enable FinTech and value-added service delivery to farmers but also enable access to a wide range of ecosystem partnerships to assist in farm improvement, animal health care, and nutrition services that help them improve animal productivity, quality of milk, and thus income.

Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, Chief Operating Officer, Airtel Payments Bank, said, that Airtel is very happy with this partnership. TelecomTalk