Stellapps partners with IPPB to promote financial tech for the dairy industry

By Leandra Monteiro

Bangalore-based dairy-tech startup, Stellapps has signed an agreement with India Post Payments Bank (IPPB) to digitise the dairy milk procurement value chain and promote banking facilities at milk collection centres.

As part of the memorandum of understanding, a pilot project has been launched in 4 villages with 200 farmers at a greenfield dairy in Dharmapuri district of Tamil Nadu. In the next coming months, IPPB and Stellapps aim to bring dairy farmers in the financial mainstream across villages in Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Bihar, and Rajasthan.

Small dairy farmers across India are faced with the overriding challenge of poor banking & financial services and non-availability of cash. In solution to this, IPPB will provide access to cash and other banking services like deposits, Aadhar enabled payment services (AePS), domestic money transfer, bill payments, and other related services. Under this tie-up, Stellapps is leveraging IPPB’s expansive last-mile distribution network of over 136,000 post offices and nearly 190,000 postmen and Grameen Dak Sevaks, equipped with smartphones and biometric devices.

Recently, Stellapps had launched a fully automated digital Direct Farmers Payment product for dairy processors called “mooPay”. This service utilises the full stack of Stellapps products and services to facilitate instant payment into dairy farmers’ existing bank accounts and helps them in receiving their actual payments without any delay. Through this partnership with IPPB Stellapps’ can drive their vision of financial inclusion of dairy farmers.

Speaking on the tie-up, J Venkatramu, MD & CEO, India Post Payments Bank said, “This strategic partnership aims to create significant opportunities and expand access to a range of financial services for millions of unbanked and underbanked dairy farmers. With a robust interoperable digital doorstep banking ecosystem in place, and leveraging the last mile network of India Post, IPPB today has the ability to serve various customer segments. With dairy supply chain being an important part of the rural economy, IPPB is committed to empowering dairy farmers.”

According to Rahul Mallick, CEO – FinTech & Value-Added Services, Stellapps, “Data led FinTech innovations can help deliver financial services to farmers in India to achieve our Government’s vision to double farmer’s incomes by 2022. Stellapps has leveraged AI/ML solutions to build an alternate credit score based on the milk pouring of over 2 million farmers on its database, and this can help them get credit from the formal financial system. mooPay has enabled village milk collection centers create a digital corridor for financial institutions to reach farmers and additionally offer value-added services like cash withdrawal, deposits, bill payments, insurance, etc. The partnership with IPPB will help drive us closer to our vision of enabling financial inclusion and economic empowerment of dairy farmers even in the remotest of villages.”

“Our focus at Stellapps has been to create a digital ecosystem that small farmers can leverage. Financial services are an important catalyst on our digital platform that can enable farmers to become dairy entrepreneurs. The partnership with IPPB will help us enfold more farmers with credit and insurance services and get the digital economy to Indian rural villages,” said Ranjith Mukundan, CEO – Stellapps.