Comments
You now don’t need a smartphone to get basic banking services from Axis Bank. This private sector bank has solved a problem that prevented millions of Indians without access to either Internet or physical branches from availing basic banking services through digital channel or otherwise.
Taking basic banking services to the estimated 400 million Indians with some or no access to data, Axis Bank has now come up with a mobile app — Axis OK — that works on feature phones even without Internet. At present, this app is available only to Android users.
“The biggest thing about Axis OK is you don’t require data. You are using the USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) & SMS platform. Data in India has two problems — it is expensive and patchy (in interior India),” Rajiv Anand, Executive Director, Axis Bank, told BusinessLine.
Anand highlighted that nearly 250 million smartphone users are already using data for availing banking and other services. “It is the other 400 million who have some or no access to data that we are targeting with this Axis OK app. We have a huge population that is yet to make the digital journey.
“For Axis OK, we have masked the complexity of USSD at the back-end and created a simple lite app (less than 1 MB in size) at the front-end which will work on feature phones also,” Anand said.
The Axis OK app is also expected to come in handy for the urban poor who cannot yet afford smartphones despite their prices coming down in recent years.
Axis OK is a multi-lingual mobile app that recognises English, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam and Gujarati.
“Our launch of Axis OK will help expand our customer base, as our ability to acquire new customers will improve,” Anand said. Currently, Axis Bank has 1.8 crore customers with 33 per cent already on Internet mobile banking.
On digital adoption, Anand said that the value of transactions put through the Axis mobile app is about ₹12,000 crore a month and growing exponentially.
“It took 18 months for the first million customers, while only four months to grow from three million to four million,” he said.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.