The Indian Postal Service, admitting the fact that the plain postal service is slowly getting out of context, is looking towards corporatisation of its services and becoming a retail financial institution.

K B H Nayar, the chief postmaster general (Karnataka) said: "The vanilla postal service is slowly slimming down in terms of revenue generation, and this is the reason we are looking at a retail financial model for the postal department. A whole lot of financial products like life insurance, mutual funds, partnership with MasterCard for rechargeable debit cards, opening up foreign exchange centres are some of the financial products which will be available through post offices in the country."

The postal department is partnering with ICICI Prudential Life Insurance for distribution, and is also looking at insurance agents for servicing clients.

"Earlier our own employees and retired postal employees were canvassing, but we should be getting insurance agents similar to LIC for our products."

The Karnataka circle partnership with Western Union Money Transfer is also on a high and carried out business worth Rs 115 crore (Rs billion) during the first six months of this fiscal as against Rs 18 crore (Rs billion) for the whole of last financial year.

"We have a massive network of 1.55 lakh post offices in the country, and we will leverage this huge network to market financial products," Nayar added.