The direct payment platform will promote transparency in transferring money

Digital technology solutions provider Stellapps announced the launch of a first-of-its-kind, fully-automated direct payment platform — ‘mooPay’ — for dairy farmers in Rajasthan.

The platform is one of the fintech solutions the company has developed for dairies and dairy farmers. mooPay acts as a payment gateway for dairies to make payments to every registered farmer, removing the risks and costs of transferring money to hundreds of thousands of farmers in hundreds of villages.

mooPay enables dairy officials to transfer milk payments digitally to member farmers from the dairies’ existing bank account to farmers’ savings bank accounts

Also read : Stellapps gave a stellar performance with 46% spike in Order Value during COVID-19

The IIT-Madras incubated dairy-tech startup and World Economic Forum’s technology pioneer, Stellapps, launched mooPay in Bhilwara district of Rajasthan on October 15 in the presence of Bilwara Dairy Union (Saras Dairy) Chairman, Ramlal Jat, LK Jain, Advisor to the Union, and Asha Sharma, MD of the Dairy.

“Stellapps has helped us bridge the gap between the farmers and the dairy union and increased transparency. Online payment enabled by Stellapps has also helped us reduce cost and eliminate the risk of Covid transmission during transactions,” Jat said.

Asha Sharma, MD of Bhilwara union, said, “Directly depositing payments in farmers’ bank accounts helps enhance farmer savings and this, in turn, builds farmer loyalty to the dairy.”

Display units

mooPay systems will automatically fetch milk payment data from the IoT devices deployed at every village dairy cooperative society, which capture the milk pouring of every farmer. The company has also installed display units at the centres that will show the quality, quantity and price of the milk of individual farmers and incentivise production of quality milk.

Also read : Benchmarking Dairy farmer’s performance : The Stellapps way

In the milk value chain, transactions predominantly have been in cash and there are no formal records of individual farmers’ income.

Stellapps stated that mooPay also enables transparency of quantity and quality of milk in the supply chain and thus farmers can efficiently realise the money directly into their bank accounts.

Customer service points

Rahul Mallick, CEO of FinTech and Value Added Services, Stellapps, said, “Enabling direct digital payments to farmer bank accounts not only helps improve financial inclusion and economic empowerment of farmers but also facilitates the design and delivery of innovative data-based farmer beneficiary programmes. Such innovations will help us achieve the government’s vision of doubling farmers’ income by 2022”.

For making transactions easier for farmers, the company has also set up customer service points at the centres itself where farmers can show their Aadhaar card and withdraw the money from their accounts. They can also visit the nearest Post office and withdraw the money or someone from the Post Office can visit their house and give them the money.

In 2019, mooPay had won the India FinTech Forum’s Financial Inclusion Initiative of the year award.

Apart from direct digital farmer payments, mooPay enables delivery of cattle loans, livestock insurance and innovative fintech solutions like sachet loans and milk receivable financing.

Source : The Hindu businessline