Its website describes its mission as follows: "India Stack is a set of open APIs that allows governments, businesses, startups and developers to utilize a unique digital Infrastructure to solve India’s hard problems towards presence-less, paperless, and cashless service delivery"[1] Of the four "distinct technology layers" mentioned on the same page, the first, the "Presenceless Layer" is the most controversial as it involves storing biometric data such as fingerprints for every citizen.
[4][5] The next stages were the introduction of eKYC (electronic Know Your Customer), which enables paperless and rapid verification of address, identity etc., followed by eSign, whereby users attach a legally valid electronic signature to a document, and Unified Payments Interface (UPI) enabling cashless payments, and most recently, DigiLocker, a platform for issuance and verification of documents and certificates.
What raised the profile of Aadhaar and India Stack worldwide was the 2016 Indian banknote demonetisation whereby ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes were phased out, officially to eliminate forgeries and money-laundering, but with the secondary objective of hastening the transition to a cashless economy.
Observers have argued that India Stack could fast-track the move to digital payment systems across the developed world and mark the end of cash.
Once the authentication was complete, Capital Float pinged the Aadhaar database to check for banking activity, and also used a mobile scraping technique to gather data from the customer's phone.
After the Pilot, the India Stack team has approached other alternate lenders to utilize the platform to give loans to under-served populations.
[15] Sri Lanka, Morocco, the Philippines, Guinea, Ethiopia, and the Togolese Republic have already started using technologies of India Stack and Tunisia, Samoa, Uganda, and Nigeria have shown their willingness.