LIC to share its Database with UIDAI
BS Reporter/ Mumbai June 10th 2010
India’s largest life insurance company, Life Insurance Corporation (LIC), on Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to become a registrar for delivery of the unique 12-digit identity number to the people of India.
LIC is the first institution other than state governments to sign an MoU with UIDAI. With this, UIDAI will have access to the database of 200 milllion policyholders of LIC.
“The MoU between LIC and UIDAI is a proof of what we have set to achieve. We will roll out the numbers in some time. We will maintain the deadline as well,” said Nandan Nilekani, chairman, UIDAI. Nilekani said UIDAI would provide 600 million numbers in the next five years.
LIC will use its IT infrastructure and add the biometric details. “LIC anyways has details like name, gender and sex of policy-holders. It just has to add the biometric details. We are still discussing with UIDAI whether to work with them on biometrics or we provide the systems,” said T S Vijayan, chairman, LIC.
LIC will start the proof-of-concept with some of the training centres and will be ready by August. “This is also a opportunity for us. It will help us integrate data where a single individual holds more than one policy. It will also give a fillip to LIC’s social initiatives like micro-insurance,” said Vijayan.
Nilekani said roping in other financial institutes would be crucial for the success of the project.
“For the last four to five months, we have had talks with the Reserve Bank of India, the Indian Bank Association and various banks on micorATM. This is an important piece of the overall concept of financial inclusion,” said Nilekani.
MicroATMs will allow customers to perform basic financial transactions using only their UID number and their fingerprint as identity proof (along with a bank identification number for inter-bank transactions).