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

Stocks

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

Cross Currency

• Rates
  
  

Shipping

• Ports
  
  

Archives

• Yesterday
• Datewise
• Resources
• In Focus
• In Depth
• Events 2007

Group Sites

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

Our Bureau

Mumbai, Aug. 26 As Indian banks gear up to offer mobile banking as the next step in payment systems, they also need to address customer concerns with regard to security.

The dependence of banks on mobile payment service providers would place the knowledge of customers in public domain. Therefore, banks would need to take adequate risk control measures to manage such risks and protect sensitive customer data.

This was the opinion shared by speakers at a seminar on mobile banking organised by Banknet here on Tuesday.

With mobile subscriber base touching 300 million in India, banks are increasingly exploring ways to adopt mobile banking practices.

Most of the banks are waiting for the issuance of final guidelines from the Reserve Bank of India to roll out mobile banking services in India. The bankers are expecting the final guidelines to be released within a fortnight.

Bankers were of the opinion that mobile banking gives the banks an opportunity to expand their customer base without incurring additional infrastructure costs. It would also help in financial inclusion as it would provide a large number of unbanked people access to banking services.

Banks could save a huge amount of money on card issuance and merchant acquiring with zero point of sale cost. Mobile banking could be used to make remittances from person to person, banking purposes and to make payments for purchases or services provided.

However, the banks would need to allay customer fears on account of hacking, breach of service, denial of service and other technological failures. Also, plain text SMS is prone to tampering and needs to be complemented with an interactive voice response system (IVR) or some other measures.

There was also a lack of consensus among bankers on the need for banks to converge on a common platform to set up an integrated network regarding the usage of mobile commerce. There is also a conflict of interest between the banks and the telecom provider, as banks would be using the customer base of the telecom companies.

More Stories on : Banking | M-Commerce

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

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