KOCHI: Mobile-phone related business in the state usually peaks on week days, but Sineesh K V’s corner shop at Perumbavoor, which sells handsets, SIM cards and recharge coupons, really comes alive on Sundays. It is not that he does sell much of them on the weekend. The rush is due to the migrants who queue up transfer money via mobile phones. There are several such shops doing brisk business in the town, known as the migrants’ hub of Kerala.
“Migrants are paid weekly. Usually on Sunday morning. Most of them prefer to remit money to their dependents back home in West Bengal, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, etc on the same day,” said Sineesh.
Depending on the banks could prove costly according to West Bengal-native Mithun Burman.
“Doing it through a bank the following day costs half day’s or even one full day’s work as we need to stand in long queues,” said Mithun.
“The attitude of bank clerks and officers towards migrants who mostly do small transactions is so bad that we would never want to go there,” he added.Mithun sends R5000-6000 almost every week to his mother via the Airtel app, installed in his smartphone. “The process is simple. I go to a mobile shop and give the cash. The shopkeeper puts the money into my mother’s SBI account. The entire procedure is over in 2-3 seconds,” he said.
No wonder, there are 40 such small shops in the vicinity of Perumbavoor bus station alone, offering mobile money transfer service, doing business for R3,000-7,000 per customer transactions on Sundays. Then there are those who operate near the plywood and sawmill firms, which employ a large number of the nearly 1.5 lakh migrants from the country’s north and north-eastern part.
And the business is zooming. Industry officials reveal migrant workers in Kerala send R180 crore per month to their dependents, of which Rs 90 crore is from Perumbavoor and Malappuram.
The business of mobile companies like Airtel and Idea, which possess the payment bank licence from the Reserve Bank of India, is growing at a fast clip.
“Migrant workers prefer to quickly send the money as there’s a risk of theft if they keep it with themselves,” said an officer at Airtel, which leads mobile payment business in Perumbavoor.
Sineesh said he does R3-4 lakh worth transactions weekly, and makes R3 for every R1,000 transferred. And he gets a minimum of 80-100 transactions on Sundays compared to 10-20 on other days.
Airtel Payment Bank alone has a network of over 2,50,000 neighbourhood Airtel retail stores, functioning as banking points, which is more than the total number of ATMs in the country.
Considering the migrant workers numbering nearly 25 lakh send home money in the R20,000-22,000 crore region every year, the share of payment banks of R2,160 crore or over 10 per cent in a matter of months is sure to shake the country’s traditional-bank business model.
What goes out
Rs 180 cr worth mobile money transfers are done per month in Kerala
Rs 22,000 cr is the total remittance made by migrants in the state per year