ALW is the developer of ZERO, India’s first domestic payment system with specific focus on reaching out to masses with lowest available communication infrastructure.
This Mumbai-based tech shop is transforming the burgeoning mobile-payments sector with innovations that connect rural India to mainstream financial institutions. Its 2003 incubation of Mchek, a mobile-to-mobile payment platform, was later adopted by the state of India and Airtel before it was spun off into a stand-alone business three years later. Its Zero platform, a technology that turns a smartphone, lockbox, and fingerprint scanner into a portable bank branch, aspires to integrate the unbanked masses in rural India. The company has set the goal for this microbanking approach to reach 50 million; so far it has reached 3 Million.