MANGALORE: City based Corporation Bank on Tuesday made the pilot launch of its first common service centre in Dharavi in Mumbai. Bibhas Kumar Srivastav, executive director inaugurated the centre. In order to extend outreach of business correspondent agents, bank has tied up with CSC e — Governance Service India Ltd , with an objective to cater to financial needs of financially excluded small people in unbanked urban wards/booths. This will be for account opening, transaction banking and other micro-services. The bank has made necessary infrastructure arrangements, including software, hardware for implementation of CSCs. The kiosk banking software uses biometric authentication to identify the user and to authorize the transactions in their bank account. Fingerprint payment, based on finger scanning, is the most common biometric payment method. Through CSCs, bank offers services to customers such as account opening, cash deposit and withdrawal, remittances from an account with a bank to an account with the same or any other bank, balance enquiry and issue receipts/statement of accounts and disbursal of credit facilities to borrowers involving small amounts. There are several advantages to the customers to operate their accounts through CSCs. The operations save on commuting time and transportation cost. CSC Centre provides basic banking services throughout the day. It facilitates small savings and small withdrawals; it offers hassle free service for local population, user-friendly and no challans, vouchers or cheques to be filled for transacting in this arrangement. Financial inclusion initiatives get a boost once common people commence opening the account and start transactions. The immediate target group for the Bank will be poor living in the urban wards, slums and petty traders and daily wage earners. The Bank will extend the services through the CSCs at unbanked areas across India shortly. The Bank recently introduced Corp Arambha, a SB account also can be used by the beneficiary customers. These accounts can be opened with simplified KYC documents on production of a self-attested photograph and affixation of signature or thumb print, as the case may be, on the account opening form.