Enabling a Paradigm Shift in Social Protection through BECKN

Delivery of social protection measures is a big challenge to any government; especially in a developing country.  Social protection program has three key components.

The first component is how we can uniquely identify the beneficiary and enrol them into the program. Digital Id revolutionised this part. The pandemic demonstrated that the countries which have established a foundation of digital id can manage the outreach much better than a country that is lacking in this area. Countries which have gone one step forward and have established a somewhat comprehensive registry of uniquely identified deserving beneficiaries did even better.

The second component is the payment system. Building on the foundation of Digital ID, in India we have introduced Unified Payment Interface (UPI) which is a completely open and interoperable protocol that has transformed the payment system.  As of now, UPI handles more than 1.25 billion transactions per month which is more than four times the volume of transactions handled by the Credit / Debit card network every month. We are now in the process of building a next layer on top of it to provide a digital voucher using completely open protocol. This could be a straightforward money voucher, or it could be a voucher that is meant for a specific product if the government wants to ensure that the benefits are provided in kind with respect to certain goods and services.

The third element is the market including the supply chain, and it is still a challenge. That is why the governments are forced to run the whole physical operation of procurement, supply chain management and retail shops. Often very very inefficiently.

BECKN foundation established by Nanden Nilekani has come out with a brilliant solution to this problem. It has published and open protocol specification which can completely revolutionize the marketplace.

What is the challenge it is attempting to solve?  Digital marketplace is a big boon; but the market is still heavily siloed.  It is increasingly becoming walled gardens of few players. Take for example retail. There are  a few large aggregators like amazon/ big basket/ Alibaba They are doing a great job; but, they are walled gardens. Same is the case with delivery or mobility or health service. It is a pain for the consumer who must look at multiple apps to make an ideal choice. This limits the choice and makes markets inefficient.

The service providers are also constrained. Unless you are a part of the aggregator platform you are at a big disadvantage in terms of discoverability.

BECKN protocol addresses this issue for both the service provider and the consumer. It is a paradigm shift; we are making internet, small business friendly and not small business internet friendly.

A simple adapter to the payment system or inventory management system based on BECKN protocol can provide any service provider equal access to the market whether he is big or small. Any frontend app which is comfortable to the consumer; could help him or her to access all the options seamlessly if it has a BECKN based connector to the network. It may be WhatsApp may be telegraph may be Google map or a special app provided by the government.

These mean simplification of service delivery [e.g. one stop payment, personalized workflows combining multiple services, granular view of events as and when they occur], freedom of choice for consumers, stitching of suppliers to fulfil a comprehensive service, much better (network driven) view of consumer demand and ability of suppliers to fulfil that demand

Such a marketplace has also the potential for bringing dramatic innovations in terms of option to the beneficiary. Once such an Open Benefit Delivery Network is in place, governments can focus on scheme design and enrolling the beneficiaries and reaching him the subsidy / financial assistance . Then leave the markets to make the best offer.

The beauty of this solution is that we are not talking about huge investment in a new platform or software solution. The service providers at a very low cost can be enabled to plug into the market. We are democratising the market just like HTTP democratised the internet. This is not a wishful thinking. We are helping the first solution built around BECKN to go live in India next month and few more are on the way.

It is time to give this a serious try and be an innovator to solve fundamental problems so that we can manage emergencies like the pandemic much better.

“He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration and desperation.” ― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

COVID-19 and Foundations of Social Security Delivery

 

The COVID-19 has turned out to be a pandemic in a very short time causing significant disruption of normal life and economic activities around the world. This has led to increased stress to financially marginalised and has also pushed many who are not otherwise included in the financially challenged segment down the precipice at least in the short term. Therefore, financial assistance by the government to a larger cross section of society has become a necessity.

One of the foundational elements to target benefits to deserving citizens is the ability to uniquely identify every person. Many developing countries don’t even have reliable functional IDs that generally cover the majority of population. Hence, the relevance of national ID becomes even more important. In this world with increasing mobile penetration if this ID database also includes a mobile number and/ or email ID seeded the whole targeting process can become more efficient. ‘Aadhaar’, in a country as large as India, has demonstrated the benefit of having a platform that issues a unique ID to every resident and enables easy authentication. Many experts have observed significant variations in targeting benefits between countries that have well-established infrastructure, institutions & processes to uniquely identify/ authenticate its residents and countries that don’t have such facilities.

The other two important foundational elements for targeted delivery are digital social registries and digital financial inclusion.

A well-established social registry consolidates the list of residents along with their key attributes essential for determining the nature and extent of assistance needed. This registry could be built by linking multiple databases against unique ID of the resident subject to good practice personal data sharing rules. Such a registry maintained digitally and updated dynamically will go a long way in correctly identifying and targeting the deserving persons and avoid leakage through fraud, double-dipping or because of any processing error. A social registry built on a unique national ID is more efficient and less error prone.

An efficient and low-cost payment system that is inter-operable among all segments of institutions that hold a customer account storing value is another critical element that encourages and enables financial inclusion. The digitalisation of holding and transaction is key to reducing the cost of account maintenance and transaction. The success of Unified Payment Interface (UPI) that has been introduced in India enabling interoperability across all banking transaction networks at practically nil cost has revolutionised the payment ecosystem. The high volume, low value transactions which were hitherto not encouraged in the conventional card driven ecosystem have found exponential growth in this regime. In January 2020, the UPI transactions crossed 1.3 billion, amounting to close 30 Billion USD, which is about 3.5 times the number of transactions in the VISA/ MASTER network. In addition to the interoperability offered by UPI, it removes the need for plastic cards and relatively expensive to maintain POS network, with conventional smartphones for both the account holder and merchant. It also enables feature phones based USSD transactions that widen the serviceable segment of the population thus giving boost to financial inclusion. This has been endorsed both by large multinational private sector players like Google and by the banker to the Central Banks, BIS. The National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) established by the Reserve Bank of India, which introduced UPI is expected to establish and promote an entity to introduce UPI to countries around the world to help them launch this in their countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic now brings to the forefront the importance of mature systems for ‘national ID’, ‘social registry’ and ‘interoperable payment systems’ as discussed above. As a response to the immediate need, many countries are quickly establishing beneficiary registries. Considering the urgency of the short term need, this is being built with lesser safeguards against ghosts, double dipping and such possible avenues for leakage. In the short term, this may be acceptable. However, instead of seeing this as a one-time exercise, it is advisable to consider this as a big step towards building a comprehensive social registry and establish mechanisms to refine this in the next few months so that this becomes the foundation for all social service delivery programs in the future. For example, Philippines is in the process of undertaking a door-to-door enumeration of 18 million households (out of 21 million total households) to create a list of beneficiaries. There could be concerns as to whether this is the best possible means to build the registry in this period. However, if this plan is already rolled out, the way forward could be as follows. Philippines is also expected to roll out their national ID project by the end of this year. It may be a good idea to use the digitised database built on the current enumeration as a starting point for enrolment for national ID by providing it as a pre-populated form that could be refined during enrolment. Thus, soon Philippines will have a biometric national ID seeded social registry. In this fashion, every country needs to evolve appropriate strategies to enrol deserving residents in the short term using the existing infrastructure and use this, in medium to long term to build a robust social registry.

Large number of residents are being provided cash transfer to tide over the crisis. While each country would rollout this cash distribution using the existing infrastructure this is the opportune time to encourage, enable and nudge the unbanked in this group to open at least a limited purpose account operated online with capping on the amount held in the account. This can be allowed with limited KYC processes. Eventually, the customers can opt to upgrade to a regular account after necessary due diligence. In this process, it is important to ensure that infrastructure and policies are in place at the earliest to enable seamless transactions across accounts at a cost that make sense for the small value transactions of customers and merchants, irrespective of which entity holds the account for storing value. Governments may have to consider regulatory nudge for interoperability and to contain the cost for low value transactions. Also, it is essential that all the entities holding account (including mobile wallets) are also regulated uniformly with respect to the safety and security of these accounts. Mobile platforms can also speed up the proliferation of low-cost micro ATM making cash in cash out (CICO) centres widely available using the mobile industry distributor network.

While each government will have their own approaches on the most pressing and emergent issues of today, a robust national ID integrated with a social registry and combined with digital financial inclusion are the building blocks that will enable governments to deliver benefits in good times as well as crises.

It is hoped that the governments and developmental agencies take these lessons in their design of policy interventions in the social sector.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, George Santayana.