Personal Finance: Mobile Banking; Dial M for Money

PERSONAL FINANCE: MOBILE BANKING
Dial M for Money

Despite its limitations, mobile banking promises to revolutionise the way people transact.

By Pooja Garg

As always, you have waited until the last day to pay your phone bill. But with another of those endless meetings coming up, the dash to the nearby payment centre looks unlikely. What do you do? Risk a dinnerless evening by requesting your wife to do the chore, or spend time, first hunting for the office peon, and, then, cajoling him to make the trip? Or simply brave a late payment fee?

You do none of these. Pick up your mobile phone, punch in a few numbers to reach your bank and, presto! the bill is paid. Clip from a sci-fi movie? No, Sir. Welcome to m-Banking, or mobile banking. Making it happen in Mumbai and Delhi are HDFC and ICICI Bank. Citibank is gearing up to offer similar services.

What's M-Banking?

M-Banking allows a customer to request for account balance, cheque books, cheque status, demand drafts, and banker's cheques, as well as stop payments, make fixed deposit enquiry, and transfer funds across the bank's branches. Besides, customers can pay their electricity and telephone bills on-line. HDFC customers, for instance, can pay their MaxTouch and BPL Mobile-both provide cellular services-Bombay State Electricity Supply, and Maharashtra State Electricity Board bills. Says Shyamal Saxena, 33, Vice-President (Liabilities Product Management), HDFC: ''We are, in a sense, content providers of banking information.''

HDFC operates a payment gateway, that authenticates on-line transactions, and has tie ups with portals like Satyamonline, IndiaInfo, Mantra Online, CyberitMall, Cricketnext, Indiacar, and VSNL, among others.

ICICI too has a quasi-gateway, called billjunction.com. Via this site, customers of the bank, as well as other banks, can pay their electricity bills on-line.

Is It Better?

M-Banking is no different from Net banking. In fact, it has many limitations. You still cannot transfer funds from one bank to another and, given the high air-time charges, it works out much more expensive than Net banking. And, for the mobile phone to access a site, the contents must be in Wireless Markup Language (WML). Most sites today use Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

Still, m-banking gives you unparalleled convenience. For one, you don't have to lug your laptop around. Once the mobile users' population grows, access rates will fall, allowing customers to use more air-time. By then, the Reserve Bank of India would also have put its own gateway in place to do on-line what it does today on paper.

M-Banking uses two kinds of communication technologies. One is WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), and the other is SMS (Short Messaging Services). WAP is more user-friendly, as it allows download of graphic information. SMS, in contrast, allows text-only access. But as the time it takes to download text is much less compared to graphics, SMS is cheaper to use.

Yet, with both, the security of transaction remains a key issue. As long as the technology and security issues are not ironed out, not too many customers would prefer to bank on M-Banking.

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