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Private lender YES Bank has developed a solution that will help feature phone users make payments even in the absence of internet network.
The solution, SIMsePay (meaning pay through SIM), has been developed by YES Bank, and allows a customer to make payments with the help of a SIM card and a sticker through a secured SMS technology. For the stickers, the bank has tied up with Taiwanese company Taisys, which has developed a proprietary solution SIMoMe for financial institutions globally to help them use the technology as a mode of payment.
“SIMsePAY is a revolutionary frugal innovation, which has the potential to truly transform the financial inclusion agenda of our country. Given the stupendous success of the JAM trinity, today almost every family has a phone and an account. Of the 1.2-billion phone users, a majority of these continue to be feature phone users. SIMsePay provides the power of financial transactions and payments to make the feature phones smart,” said Rana Kapoor, MD and CEO, YES Bank.
A secure platform
The bank’s Chief Digital Officer, Ritesh Pai, told BusinessLine that the technology was developed for feature phone users to help them pay using a secure platform. The technology will work on the SIM provided by any telecom service provider and is device-agnostic.
Pai said that YES Bank has tied up with 15 co-operative banks and has issued about 30,000 stickers so far on a pilot basis; the bank will roll these out to more banks in the coming months. Co-operative banks, in turn, provide these stickers to their customers on registration.
The sticker has to be placed on the SIM after which a menu is invoked on the phone with features such as money transfers, bill pay, check balance, block SIMsePay, change pin and mini statement in both Hindi and English. It will be rolled out in other regional languages soon.
“We want to reach out to the lowest denominator in the banking system. While talking to co-operative banks in rural areas, we found that their customers were aware of mobile payments and wanted basic solutions such as fund transfers, bill payments, mobile recharges and small ticket or repetitive transactions on their basic phones mostly after demonetisation,” Pai said, and added that SIMsepay is helping in the transition from a cash-led economy to a less-cash economy.
He also added that SIMsePay reduces the cost of doing transactions for consumers, who, otherwise, would have to travel to their banks even for small-ticket transactions. .
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