New Delhi, May 23 (IANS): Aadhaar holders executed 1.96 billion authentication transactions in April 2023, a jump of more than 19.3 per cent over April 2022, highlighting the growing usage of Aadhaar and growth of digital economy in the country, according to an official release.

"Aadhaar holders executed 1.96 billion authentication transactions in April 2023, a jump of more than 19.3 per cent over April 2022, indicating the growth of digital economy and usage of Aadhaar in India," the Ministry of Electronics & IT said in a statement.

It said that while a majority of these authentication transaction numbers were carried out by using fingerprints, this is followed by demographic and OTP based authentications.

"Face authentication too is witnessing a good usage across sectors for easy service delivery," the statement read.

While Aadhaar saturation among adult population continues to be near universal, the saturation level among all age groups has now climbed to 94.8 per cent, indicative of the reach and adoption of Aadhaar among residents.

During the month of April more than 15.44 million Aadhaars were updated on request from the residents, it said.

It also said that Aadhaar e-KYC service continues to play a "stellar role" for banking and non-banking financial services by providing transparent and improved customer experience, and facilitating ease of doing business.

"More than 250.5 million eKYC transactions were carried out in April alone," the ministry said.

Adoption of e-KYC has significantly reduced customer acquisition cost of entities like financial institutions, telecom service providers and others.

The cumulative number of Aadhaar e-KYC transactions so far has moved past 14.95 billion by the end April 2023.