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Indian mobile payments slower than anticipated

The Reserve Bank of India has released a report that indicated that they had expected faster uptake.

According to the most recent Financial Stability Report from the Reserve Bank of India, the uptake of Indian mobile payments and banking has been promising, and yet considerably slower than had been expected over the span of the last three years.

The only banks in the country that can offer services over smartphones and tablets are those that are licensed.

According to the Central Bank in the country, in order to be able to offer Indian mobile paymentshttp://www.mobilecommercepress.com/mobile-banking-rise-australia/853413/, the institutions that wish to provide them to consumers must not only have a license from the Reserve Bank of India, but it must also be supervised by that agency. At the time of the report, there were 78 banks – including a number of them that are regional rural banks, as well as urban co-ops – that had been given the necessary permissions for offering these services.

Many are continuing to see a massive amount of potential from Indian mobile payments.India Mobile Payments

The Financial Stability Report claimed that using smartphones and tablets for banking offers people in India the greatest opportunity for financial inclusion that has ever been available. The report explained that “Helped by the rapid spread of use of mobile telephony, the growth in mobile banking has been encouraging over last three years.”

That said, it also pointed out that the growth and the overall acceptance of using these smartphone based services as a “channel for accessing banking services” has been much lower than had been anticipated.

Aside from the low awareness and adoption levels, there are also challenges in the industry regarding more rapid growth include the fact that banks aren’t capable of connecting bank account numbers with cell phone numbers, and there is a lack of compatibility between the apps and the devices that people are actually using in the country. There is also a lack of partnerships and models for sharing revenue between network operators and the banks, themselves.

Finally, Indian mobile payments have also been held back by the challenges in obtaining a USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) channel that is in operation for the purpose.

Mobile security threats are growing and evolving

Predictions consistently forecast a massive increase in problems of this nature for smartphones and tablets.

The latest forecasts regarding mobile security threats in 2014 have indicated that clickjacking, watering hole attacks, and other threats over smartphones and tablets will continue to grow in the danger that they will present.

Cyber criminals are increasingly expanding the focus of their attacks to a broader range of technologies.

According to Trend Micro, these cyber criminals are tucking themselves away in the Deep Web and are using much more sophisticated and targeted attack campaigns. This firm, which is an expert in internet and mobile security threats, has made its predictions for this year and has released them in its web video project which was entitled “2020: the Series”. This looked not only at this year but at the problems that will be faced right through to the end of this decade.

According to the firm, this year will already be a considerable one for mobile security threats.

Mobile Security Threats on the RiseThe CTO of Trend Micro, Raimund Genes, has explained that 2014 will be a “prolific year for cybercrime”. This will have an impact on individuals, businesses, and even governments. Among the most common techniques are likely to be spear phishing, open source research. These are forecasted to experience a large amount of growth this year, particularly as best practice knowledge is shared throughout the cyber criminal community.

Two of the most problematic areas in smartphone and tablet use will be in dangers in mobile banking and in targeted attacks. The report indicated that the traditional two-step verification will no longer be enough to ensure that the user remains protected.

Other forms of attack that are likely to continue to take off are malicious apps as well as man-in-the-middle attacks. These are likely to be problematic for both individual consumers and corporate users of smartphones.

The vice president of security research Trend Micro, Rik Ferguson, spoke of this trend in mobile security threats, saying that “Technology advances only more rapidly and attackers are consistently just behind the crest of that innovation, waiting for widespread consumer adoption of new gadgets, new platforms or new ways of doing things.”