Mobile banking transactions have grown in leaps and bounds in the first eight months of the current financial year. Transactions in the reporting period up to November are already 1.36 times that reported in the full of last financial year.

As per Reserve Bank of India data, the volume of mobile banking transactions from April-November soared to 53.086 crore as against 38.949 crore in the enitre previous financial year.

In sync with the increase in the volume of transactions, the value too has jumped significantly. The value of transactions conducted via the mobile banking channel has soared by 1.71 times in the reporting period to ₹6,91,964 crore as compared to ₹4,04,091 crore in the whole of last financial year.

As at September-end 2016, total wireless (mobile) subscriber base stood at about 105 crore and the wireless tele-density was at 82.17. In a recent speech, R Gandhi, Deputy Governor of RBI, said that with growing use of the Internet on the mobile phone, this medium is becoming a natural channel of choice for both customers as well as service providers. Hence, application-based mobile banking services as well as net banking services for mobile users are being offered by almost all banks.

A large number of bank and non-bank PPI issuers (mobile wallet issuers) also leverage on this channel and have introduced their own mobile applications, he added

Gandhi observed that, “Till recently, the mobile banking applications were largely operating in silos, particularly for merchant payments (which had to be routed as Person 2 Business push payments), and generally not interoperable across merchants and customers of different banks.

“With the introduction of Unified Payments Interface (UPI), twin benefits have come into place for mobile banking – convenience of operations for customers (who can provide just a registered virtual address instead of details of bank accounts etc, for making/receiving payments) and merchant ‘pull’ payments.”

The Deputy Governor felt that UPI, which is application-based and usable on smartphones with Internet access – when fully operational across banks – has the potential to revolutionise the mobile payments arena.

According to the the RBI’s operative guidelines, “mobile banking transactions” is undertaking banking transactions using mobile phones by bank customers that involve credit/debit to their accounts.

Besides, it covers acceptance of transfer of funds instruction for credit to beneficiaries of same/or another bank in favour of pre-registered beneficiaries, accessing the bank accounts by customers for non-monetary transactions like balance enquiry, stop payment instruction of cheques, transactions enquiry, location of the nearest ATM/branch etc.

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