Axis My India has announced its new platform — People Empowerment Platform (PEP) — based on Google technology. This includes government social welfare schemes, basic day-to-day amenities, employment opportunities, and healthcare benefits, and has the potential to benefit up to 250 million Indian citizens across the country.

Built on Google Cloud’s scalable and secure infrastructure, Axis My India’s People Empowerment Platform (PEP) application will use Google Cloud’s generative AI (GenAI) technology to provide relevant information about government schemes and desired communication/content to citizens based on their individual and family needs. In order to be useful to people across geographies, the PEP will be designed to support 13 regional languages employing Google translation API and Vertex AI for real-time translation and transliteration of information. This two-way communication will facilitate enhanced engagement with Axis My India’s Mission ‘To Actively Contribute Every day to Transform a Billion Lives’ by acting as a digital and physical ‘Jan Suvidha Kendra’ (Public Welfare Centre). The roll-out of PEP will be supported by Axis My India’s network of local offices in more than 700 districts across India.

Speaking on the partnership, Pradeep Gupta, Chairman and Managing Director, Axis My India, said, “Our collaboration with Google marks a pivotal moment in our pursuit to positively impact the lives of a billion Indians. By leveraging Google Cloud technologies, we aim to create an inclusive platform that truly empowers citizens with authentic information and solutions based on their needs. Axis My India’s massive scale and expertise affords us an unprecedented opportunity to bring information equity between rural and urban India through our platform. We are certain that we will achieve our ambitious goal of acting as a digital super-app for all 250 million Indian households.”

“Google Cloud offers a wide range of services that can benefit business in terms of scalability, flexibility, security, performance, innovation and support. Rising mobile connectivity presents the opportunity to create an inclusive, equitable, and safer internet for everyone, no matter their literacy, language, or location. We are excited to work with Axis My India to help advance their vision with the People Empowerment Platform, backed by state-of-the-art Gen AI Cloud technologies from Google Cloud. This will help them bring government services and programs to more Indians across the country,” said Bikram Singh Bedi, Managing Director, Google Cloud India.

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Google is adding a blue checkmark to select senders’ names on Gmail to verify their identity, the company announced in a blog post. It noted, “In 2021, we introduced Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) in Gmail, a feature that requires senders to use strong authentication and verify their brand logo in order to display a brand logo as an avatar in emails.”

This comes when blue checkmarks have made headlines in recent times due to Twitter’s legacy accounts.

According to Google, the new blue checkmarks will appear next to companies that have adopted Gmail’s existing BIMI feature. The company claimed that the update would help users identify messages from legitimate senders against impersonators.

Users will see a blurb saying that the “sender of the email has verified that they own the Google domain and logo in the profile image.”

“Strong email authentication helps users and email security systems identify and stop spam, and also enables senders to leverage their brand trust. This increases confidence in email sources and gives readers an immersive experience, creating a better email ecosystem for everyone,” Google said.

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Google in India last year removed more than 3500 personal loan apps from the Play Store for violations of the Play policy requirements, the company announced in its latest Bad Apps report.

For those unaware, Google Play Protect is a security feature built into Android devices that scans apps for malicious behaviour and alerts users about potentially harmful apps. Let’s look at how the feature kept Android devices safe last year.

More stringent policy for personal loan app developers in India

After revising its Play Store developer program policy for financial services apps in 2021, Google last year introduced additional requirements for developers offering personal loans in India as facilitators on behalf of NBFCs and banks.

“In 2022, in India, we introduced additional requirements for developers offering personal loans in India as facilitators on behalf of NBFCs and banks, requiring them to also prominently disclose the names of all their partner NBFCs and banks in the app’s description and provide a live URL to the respective websites of partner NBFCs and banks where they are listed as an official agent, as part of the Personal Loan App Declaration,” Google said.

1.43 million policy-violating apps blocked

Last year, Google blocked 1.43 million policy-violating apps from entering the Play Store. The company says that this was “in part due to new and improved security features and policy enhancements, in combination with our continuous investments in machine learning systems and app review processes.”

173K bad developer accounts banned

Google continues its fight against malicious developers and fraud rings, banning 173K bad accounts and preventing over $2 billion in fraudulent and abusive transactions. The company has also strengthened its verification process, saying that developers last year had to use email, phone, and other verification methods to join the Play ecosystem.

500K apps stopped from requesting sensitive permissions

Sensitive permissions are those that allow apps to access users’ personal information, such as contacts, location, camera, microphone, SMS, and call logs.

Google says that by enhancing the security and policies of the Android platform, and by providing guidance and training to developers, the company stopped about 500K apps from requesting permissions that could compromise users’ privacy and data over the past three years.

500K security weaknesses fixed

App Security improvements helped developers fix 500K security weaknesses affecting around 300K apps with combined installations amounting to 250B, according to Google. “We also launched the Google Play SDK Index to help developers evaluate an SDK’s reliability and safety and make informed decisions about whether an SDK is right for their business and their users,” added Google.

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