As a part of digitalizing government services in all sectors, countries are replacing the traditional pension payment system with a biometric system. Because the manual payment services heavily depend on infrastructure, workforce, materials, and logistics, fraud and leakages are common in the system. But, leveraging the digital system backed by biometric authentication can ease the pension disbursing process and save costs. See the facts you must know about the digital pension payments system implemented in Africa.

The gaps in the traditional pension system

The traditional pension payment system in Africa largely depends on ground-level officials. The official creates a list of pensioners and sends it to the superior for validation and money remittance. This list includes new pensioners, removing deceased pensioners, and revised pension amounts. Many errors occur in this list, and because of the lack of openness, pensioners will not know the corrected pension amount. Furthermore, pensioners must always be present at their local office with their ID and passbook. All this will add to the cost of pension disbursement and possible scams.

Also, read Aadhaar Enabled Biometric Devices for Efficient Implementation of Government Schemes.

Digital pension payment: Consolidating the process

The traditional system is a decentralized process, where adding pensioners and confirming the death of pensioners are vested on the pension official. Changing these hierarchies, digital pension payment allows pensioners directly register themselves to the digital system. The registration requires their demographic and professional information with biometric data. The biometric data saved in the centralized system helps to authenticate the pensioner from anywhere and verify their pension amount through the statement.

In countries like Africa, where financial infrastructure is limited, a biometric pension system can reduce the cost of pension disbursement. Also, the large population of pensioners and unidentified immigrants are a potential threat to the traditional system, not the biometric system, which is accurate and can handle high throughput.

How does a digital pension payment system benefit pensioners?

Retired life is to explore and find the peace that involves using pension money. But unfortunately, pensioners should appear at the pension office to prove themselves alive and to receive their pension. Or else, pensioners must submit their life certificate issued by the authority where they have served earlier and have it delivered to the disbursing agency. This will cause a lot of hardship and unnecessary inconvenience to the pensioners in their old age and the authorities.

The digital pension system intends to simplify the authentication process, making it more convenient for pensioners. With this effort, the obligation for retirees to physically present themselves in front of the disbursing agency or the certification authority will become a thing of the past, greatly helping older adults and removing unnecessary logistical difficulties.

Authorities in African nations are employing multimodal biometric technologies for authentication to establish a more inclusive and accurate pension system for the people's convenience.

Note:

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