The Hindu Business Line : Bank on your mobile

In small, measured steps, India is marching towards m-commerce — a world where you can make all payments by keying in instructions on your mobile phone.

In developed countries (particularly Europe) it is common to find people paying for even basic purchases at shopping malls or train tickets with a few clicks of the keypad. India may not be there yet, but we have started the journey.

Barclays Bank recently launched ‘Hello Money’, a mobile banking service that enables one to do an entire gamut of things — enquiry, funds transfer, bill payments and requests for financial statements. Until this product arrived, the best ‘mobile banking’ one could do was to check bank balance or phone-in instructions to the banker. But with Hello Money, a customer of Barclays can, for example, pay his electricity bills via the mobile phone. Click a few keys and the account is debited, the bill is paid — all without any human interface. Over time, Barclays intends to enlarge the scope of this service to include payments to a whole lot of other things, such as for purchase of an air ticket.

Many other banks are in various stages of preparation to launch similar services, which are sure to become ubiquitous. South Indian Bank recently told this newspaper that it would launch similar services in two months. But Barclays is the first to get there.

Familiar technology

What is interesting is that Barclays Bank has used a very familiar but seldom used (as far as m-commerce is concerned) technology for enabling this service.

Called Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), it is a technology unique to GSM mobile services and offers information transmission over existing networks. This means users do not have to enable a GPRS link on their phone (as is done currently) to download any application.

Also, USSD provides session-based communication, which means the service does not store any data or banking session on the handset that can be misused by a third party. There are no records of the transaction one completed, no SMS updates that are stored (a common feature in other banks’ mobile banking solutions).

As all operations happen in real time, data used is not stored in the handset memory or the GSM network but only in the Barclays Bank server.

Consequently, turnaround response times for these applications are shorter than SMS. The primary benefit of USSD is that it allows for very fast communication between the user and an application. Most of the applications enabled by USSD are menu-based and include services such as mobile prepay and chat.

For the user this means banking is now available on a toll free number (*598*1#) that will guide one to a menu-based system. All handsets — low-end to high end — can access this service at a monthly subscription of Rs 30, just like how ring tones are subscribed to. The service is available on roaming at no extra charge.

“We want to reach out to as many prospective customers as possible,” says Suresh Gurumani, Head (Retail Banking), Barclays Bank. So a format that mobile users are familiar with was chosen.

An in-house IT team created the application and deployed it in partnership with IBM, Accenture and Cisco. A dedicated call centre in Mumbai will help customers access mobile banking.

While Barclays has applied to the Reserve Bank of India seeking to increase its branch network in India, it wants to simultaneously increase customer base through ‘Hello Money’, Gurumani told eWorld. “There are 230 million mobile users in India and we want a chunk of this market,” he said, without sharing any targets.

The service is currently available on Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular networks in four cities. The bank plans to launch services on other networks covering 40 cities, including making the service available on CDMA handsets.

It has also embarked on developing ‘Hello Money’ applications for niche segments of business users — micro finance groups and transportation companies (fleet operators). “We plan to add many more m-commerce services on the same platform,” Gurumani said.

Bill payment is one such area where the company plans to sign on more organisations who will accept payments through mobile banking.

Currently 84 entities, including major mobile and telephone companies, insurance companies, electricity and gas agencies, city corporations collecting water and property taxes, and charitable trusts have partnered with Barclays.

archana@thehindu.co.in

More Stories on : Telecommunications | E-Commerce & E-Business | Banking

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