Bill Gates Hails India's Financial Inclusion Policies, Calls UPI And Aadhaar A Phenomenal System

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has hailed India's policies for financial innovation and inclusion and also revealed that his foundation is working with other nations to roll out technologies based on the ones implemented by India, Bloomberg has reported.

Gates while speaking at the Singapore Fintech Festival praised India's platforms like the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and the Aadhaar, which he said have drastically reduced the cost of money distribution among the poor.

"India is a great example...Things are really exploding there and innovation around that system is phenomenal", Gates said.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now helping other nations to establish such open-source technologies.

Since its introduction in 2016 the UPI has gone from strength to strength in India. In November it recorded a whopping 2.2 billion transactions.

National Payments Corporation of India data showed that these digital transactions, through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), almost doubled from 1.21 billion witnessed in the same period a year ago.

Aadhaar is the world's largest biometric database and almost 123 crore Aadhaar cards have been issued so far. It has played a pivotal role in preventing leakages via its integration with the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme.