Mobile banking yet to take off among Indian banks

MUMBAI: The much-touted mobile banking is yet to take off in the country owing to lack of customer awareness and staff training.

State-owned banks have received a much poorer response from their clients compared with their private-sector peers for mobile banking, with only a small number of PSB customers showing interest to avail the service.

Union Bank of India, the first state-owned bank which introduced mobile-based banking services in the market, has so far added only 1,700 customers in mobile banking, bank's, General Manager (Personal Banking) S Govindan said.

"Many customers are still finding it difficult to download the software. Also, the staff needs to be trained in a better way to help customers. As the customer-awareness improve, I hope that the response will pick up," Govindan told PTI here.

In a bid to popularise the service, UBI plans to launch 20 dedicated branches across the country in the next 10-15 days where trained staff will help customers understand the product, he said.

India's largest lender State Bank of India (SBI) has also received poor response for its mobile banking product, which it launched in December 2008.

It rolled out the service in association with local technology-service provider, Spanco Telesystems.

SBI has so far received only 10,000 registrations for mobile banking but hopes to attract more clients to avail the service in the months ahead, an SBI official said.

"It will take some time for this (mobile banking) to pick up. People are not techno-savvy and keep apprehensions about the safety of this service," SBI official said.

As of now, SBI does not have any plans to launch special programmes to attract more customers into mobile banking fold but will look at these options in future, the official said.

According to Reserve Bank's guidelines, banks are allowed to offer money transfer facility for customers through mobile phones, with an upper limit of Rs 5,000.

Customers can also avail services such as balance enquiry, account statement, cheque book request, utility bill payments, ticket booking among other services.

Another leading government-owned lender, IDBI Bank has also received a lukewarm response from its retail customers for its mobile banking roll out. The bank has a tie-up with service provider Paymate for the service.

"Since we launched the scheme, around 10,000 customers have registered for the service. Providing proper customer education and training the staff is critical," IDBI Bank's Head Personal Banking C S Jain said.

On the other side, private players such as ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and Kotak Mahindra have seen an encouraging response from customers through their mobile banking products.

ICICI Bank has 80 lakh customers registered so far for mobile banking while HDFC Bank has 40 lakh registered clients. Kotak Mahindra Bank has around 52,000 clients under the mobile banking fold.

However, the number of customers actively using the service is understood to be far less compared with the number of total registered clients.

"The trend is catching up and overall we have received an overwhelming response... It is a matter of time before we see more and more customers opting for mobile-based financial transactions," ICICI Bank said.
article taken from economictimes.indiatimes