Aadhaar[1], the biometric digital identity infrastructure in India, has been making waves in the international community for years now. Through governmental push, the Aadhaar number has progressed to become the unique identifier of an individual’s identity in India. This, when tied up with a plethora of use cases in business, financial inclusion, and governmental benefits space, presented a strong case for Aadhaar to be the primary enabler of disruption in the Indian business as well as the social landscape.
With the biometric database, the traditional business ecosystem suddenly found a new way to onboard customers through eKYC. Select banks, telcos, etc., used Aadhaar for instant onboarding. In fact, there have been many new startups, mostly in FinTech space, which have designed their unique value proposition around instant onboarding. The instant onboarding using just the Aadhaar number as an identifier had immense potential in not just reducing the operational costs of these businesses, but also presented a case for an enhanced customer experience[2] in the Indian market.
However, in the rush of leveraging Aadhaar for onboarding, the businesses skipped the more foundational and necessary caveat – the importance of building digitized processes. Sure, Aadhaar had fast-tracked the process and given businesses an opportunity to leverage a ready-made identity network; but it also resulted in businesses getting distracted from their original, basic approach of digital transformation[3] which required them to fine-tune their existing business processes and digitize them with the use of modern-day technologies such as AI/ML[4], blockchain[5], RPA[6], etc. And this was exposed when the Supreme Court of India announced their recent verdict last week in which they
