Our story

The initial seeds of Paysa were planted in an introductory engineering class at Smith where Christine, Darpan and Yashna came together to devise a solution that would tackle their concerns over income inequality and low levels of financial literary in the developing world. After months of research, brainstorming and problem solving, Paysa was born and was sent to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a proposal for their Grand Challenges Exploration. Among 59 other projects, Paysa was recognized and funded out of over 1800 submissions. With the aid of the foundation, Paysa has now begun to implement its proposed solution to the problem of enabling merchant acceptance of mobile money payments.

 
 

Our Mission

Our project works towards the goal of reducing poverty and increasing financial mobility.

We will provide merchants in Nelamangala, India with devices to scan the fingerprints of customers, enabling them to pay without cash. Upon receiving a bill, the merchant will display the total amount and the customer can place their finger on the scanning device to confirm the amount. Axis Bank's software will use fingerprints to verify the customer’s identity and complete the transaction. 

The power of financial mobility rests at our fingertips, and we want to make it easy.