The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on Tuesday laid down ground-rules for telecom companies offering mobile banking services. Under the new rules, mobile companies have to enable banks to complete a transaction within ten seconds.
By the new guidelines, telecom companies have to give banks and customers the option to transact using either SMS, Interactive Voice Response, or Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD). All the operators are already using these platforms and hence do not have to make additional investments.
USSD, for example, is used by operators to inform pre-paid cards users about their balance on a real-time basis. The service providers can also optionally facilitate the bank to use WAP or Sim Application Toolkit (STK). STK has been deployed by many mobile operators around the world for many applications, often where a menu-based approach is required.
Cost-effective
The regulations are aimed at ensuring that mobile operators offer good services to banks that launch mobile banking services. “Mobile banking consists of banking transactions and the use of mobile networks for communicating through mobile phones by the customer for such transactions. The entire transaction depends on the capability of the mobile network to deliver a fast, reliable and cost-effective method of communication,” TRAi said.
“The response time for delivery of messages for mobile banking services generated by the customer or the bank will be within the prescribed time-frame of less than 10 seconds for SMS, IVR, WAP and STK, and less than 2 seconds for USSD,” the regulator said. The regulations also mandate that if the SMS sent by the bank is not delivered to the customer due to network or handset-related problems, then a USSD communication confirming the completion of the transaction should be sent.
Two stages only
The regulator has also made it mandatory for operators to ensure that, to get the benefit of banking services such as cash deposit, cash withdrawal, money transfer and balance enquiry, the customer should be able to complete the transaction in not more than two stages. Every access provider needs to maintain records of mobile banking messages for six months for audit purposes. TRAI will monitor the quality of services offered by the mobile operators on a regular basis.