A day after the Indian government started a campaign to give identification numbers to all its 1.2 billion citizens. One thing they made sure is that everybody gets a unique identity which will help all of the citizens in many ways. Ajay Banga, the newly minted chief executive of MasterCard, arrived in town, eager to lend a hand. The program will identify people based on fingerprints and retina scans, and could make it easier for the government to route food stamps and other payments to people below the poverty line.
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Observing that 85 percent of the world's transactions are still in currency, he has declared a "war on cash" to nudge as many consumers as possible toward electronic payments, preferably processed by MasterCard. Although competition to handle payments is intense in the United States, the wider battlegrounds are in countries like India and Brazil, which have vast numbers of people without bank accounts, and a growing middle class.