Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairman of State Bank of India, has called for earmarking telecom spectrum separately for the financial services sector so that issues such as transactions being timed out due to lack of bandwidth are effectively addressed.

Speaking at a panel discussion organised by the Indian Banks’ Association, Bhattacharya said telecom companies have a different aim: carry voice, data, make profits, and even have their own payments banks. So, for them, carrying financial transactions through their telecom network is not a priority, she said.

She asked: “Is it possible to have a separate spectrum only for financial transactions?” A separate network only for financial transactions. Security (of transactions) could be also done better. If we want financial transactions to be simple, easy and convenient, this is probably one way of doing it?” She observed that there were cases of card transactions, where SMS alerts about the transaction being executed were received by the customer 24 hours after the transaction had been done.

“Ever since demonetisation was announced and digital transactions had spiked, the infrastructure itself, that is, the spectrum on which all these transactions are done, wasn’t sufficient to carry them...”

She observed that transacting digitally had be convenient enough to be adopted by people. “That is not happening because the infrastructure doesn’t seem to be there,” she said.

Related Topics