The State Bank of India (SBI), country’s largest lender in the coming months will be launching ‘mobile wallet’- a first of its kind which will reduce weight of our wallets as we don’t have to stuff our wallets with cash when we go for buying vegetables or going to a restaurant. It will also speed up the process for transactions linked to savings account.
A senior official from the bank said, “It will be a stored-value account (based on a) customer handset and it is primarily meant to attract new customers.”
In mobile banking service, the consume sends a payment request via a short messaging service (SMS) text message or Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) to a short code and a charge is applied to the customer’s phone bill or, in the proposed SBI unique mobile wallet scheme.
SBI’s mobile wallet scheme will be operational most probably either by the end of August or September this year. The official informed that bank will not levy any charges for opening a mobile wallet and for mobile-to-mobile transactions.
Bank customers who have high-end mobiles can use the service through an application provided by the bank, while low-end mobile users can use SMS.
The high-end mobile users will also be allowed to withdraw cash up to Rs 5,000. The whole transaction process will be secure as the data will go through end-to-end encryption. While the low-end mobile users will not be allowed to withdraw cash but, these consumers will be allowed to use a mobile only for small payments.
However bank has not clarified whether it will charge for cash withdrawals. But the official said the charges for withdrawal can be 1% on the cash withdrawn from an account. At present, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) allows only Rs5,000 to be withdrawn through such mobile transactions.
For providing this service, official told, SBI has already signed an agreement with various service providers like Vodafone Essar, Bharti Airtel, Aircel, Tata Docomo and Idea.
Recently, the SBI customers who did not had mobiles equipped with Java or GPRS allowed them to access its application- —‘State Bank freedoM’- which could be availed from all application bases, over Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), and over USSD.
Using this service customers can transfer funds, view balance and mini-statements of their accounts, pay bills, request for cheque book, recharge of prepaid mobile connections, viewing of demat account details, top-up of direct-to-home (DTH) satellite TV services, and m-commerce transactions.
SBI launched its 'State Bank freedoM’ service on a pilot basis in March 2009 at all its branches.
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