Fund transfer via feature phones set to get easier
Mayur Shetty
|
Mumbai:
|
Starting next month, anyone
with a mobile will be able to transfer funds by merely using the mobile
number of the recipient. The National Payments Corporation of India
(NPCI) has integrated the *99# messaging-based mobile banking service
with its Unified Payments Interface (UPI), allowing transfer of money
with minimum details. Currently , feature phones are not used for
everyday payments despite there being a platform that allows use of USSD
(Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) messaging for the purpose.
USSD is the messaging platform that prepaid customers use to check their
talktime balance. The problem in using it for banking is that it
requires inputs of several dozen characters such as 16 digit account
number , 11 digit IFSC code, recipient's name and seven digit Mobile
Money Identification Number (MMID).
The UPI, which was laun
ched a few months earlier, aimed to address this problem by linking the
account identifiers (Ac number, IFSC code, name) to an `alias' which
includes mobile number and email.
However, the limitation was that the service was available only on banking applications, which needed smartphones with internet connections.Now, with NPCI bringing UPI to feature phones, someone with Rs 1000 handset can reap the benefits of instant payments.This `optimized USSD' will be launched on January 30 with a new brand name. “The only condition is that the bank should have joined the UPI platform. With this, even if the customer holds a basic feature phone, he can still avail the benefits that were hitherto available only for those with smartphones,“ said AP Hota, MD & CEO, NPCI. If the account holder keys in the recipient's mobile number, the UPI platform will retrieve the recipient's name from its server, helping the sender authenticate the number.
Sources @ http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31812&articlexml=Fund-transfer-via-feature-phones-set-to-get-28122016019025
The UPI, which was laun
ched a few months earlier, aimed to address this problem by linking the
account identifiers (Ac number, IFSC code, name) to an `alias' which
includes mobile number and email.However, the limitation was that the service was available only on banking applications, which needed smartphones with internet connections.Now, with NPCI bringing UPI to feature phones, someone with Rs 1000 handset can reap the benefits of instant payments.This `optimized USSD' will be launched on January 30 with a new brand name. “The only condition is that the bank should have joined the UPI platform. With this, even if the customer holds a basic feature phone, he can still avail the benefits that were hitherto available only for those with smartphones,“ said AP Hota, MD & CEO, NPCI. If the account holder keys in the recipient's mobile number, the UPI platform will retrieve the recipient's name from its server, helping the sender authenticate the number.
Sources @ http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31812&articlexml=Fund-transfer-via-feature-phones-set-to-get-28122016019025
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