• Investment World
• eWorld
• Brand Line
• Mentor
• Life
• Brand Quest
• The New Manager

Stocks

• Quotes
• SE Diary
• Scoreboard
• Open-End Mutual Fund

Cross Currency

• Rates
  
  

Shipping

• Ports
  
  

Archives

• Yesterday
• Datewise
• Resources
• In Focus
• In Depth

Group Sites

• The Hindu
• The Hindu ePaper
• Business Line
• Business Line ePaper
• Sportstar
• Frontline
• The Hindu eBooks
• The Hindu Images

Priya Nair

Mumbai, Jan. 11 More banks are offering value-added services such as mobile banking for customer convenience. Many banks already offer SMS banking, where customers can get information about account balance, record of the last few transactions conducted, place chequebook requests and get updates on interest rate changes and other new products.

But banks are now also offering fund transfer and bill payments through mobile phones.

ICICI Bank today launched iMobile, a mobile banking platform, using which customers can transfer funds to accounts of ICICI Bank and other banks, pay utility bills and insurance premium.

Next week, the country’s largest bank, State Bank of India is expected to follow suit.

ICICI Bank’s application works across all GSM service providers. But it is not compatible on CDMA as of now. The bank is working on it, said Mr V. Vaidyanathan, Executive Director, ICICI Bank.

“Mobile banking is far more user friendly and convenient. We have seen a rise in customers using the Internet from 2 per cent to 20 per cent in five years. We feel that customers using mobiles for their banking transactions can touch 40 per cent, much faster,” he said.

SBI’s mobile banking service, which will be launched next week, will also allow customers to pay telephone bills and recharge their mobile SIM cards, to begin with. By next month the service may also extend to payment of utility bills and fund transfer.

As per surveys done by SBI, about 15 lakh of its customers who use post-paid mobile connections and use their SBI accounts for bill payment are likely to migrate to mobile banking, the official said.

“We have not done any research on pre-paid customers yet. But the number of customers using pre-paid connections is likely to be much higher,” he added.

The bank has so far signed an agreement for providing the services with only one service provider and is in talks with another one.

More Stories on : M-Commerce | ICICI Bank Ltd | State Bank of India

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
US-China currency war: Change in the tenor of debate

Copyright © 2008, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line