Tag: india mobile payments

This new smartphone payments service has been made available to device users in India.

Idea Cellular has recently announced the launch of its new mobile wallet service, called Idea Money, that is designed to give consumers the ability to complete certain payment transactions, such as recharging their prepaid mobile accounts.

It is also designed to allow utility bell payments DTH recharges, and make online money transfers.

This service was first launched in July in Mumbai and it will be rolled out throughout India through a number of phases, said a source from the company. That said, that individual declined to share the availability timeline for the availability of the mobile wallet across the country. This is far from the only service of this nature that is available within the Indian market. Vodafone, Tata Teleservices, Bharti Airtel, and other mobile operators are already providing mobile payments options to their customers.

The Idea Money website describes the mobile wallet as a semi-closed prepaid payment service.

That website explained that the service is being offered by Idea Mobile Commerce Services Limited (IMCSL), which obtained its license to provide it through the Reserve Bank of India. Idea stated that “Simply put, it is a prepaid account which can be accessed using your mobile phone or the Internet for conducting a variety of transactions like prepaid mobile recharges, DTH recharges, utility bill payments, money transfers & more.”

At the moment, the number of uses for these mobile payments is limited to certain bills on top of money transfers. It can recharge prepaid mobile services, recharge DTH, pay off utility bills, and send money to specific accounts. Though this does provide consumers with a convenient opportunity to use their smartphones and tablets to make payments, the company is hopeful that the uses will soon be able to broaden.

At the same time that it is focused on rolling out this mobile wallet across the remainder of India, it is also looking into additional uses for the service. This includes the introduction of mobile payments for shopping at stores and restaurants, for example, as well as uses for ticketing transactions. This could help to boost the appeal of the service among consumers who are using their smartphones for a growing number of daily activities.

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.

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.