The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued new guidelines for mobile phone banking in a bid to make banking through mobile phones faster and safer. Under the Mobile Banking Regulations 2012, the telecom operators will have to give banks and customers option to use SMSes, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and unstructured supplementary services data (USSD) for transactions. The regulator also wants service providers to facilitate the bank to use WAP or SIM Application ToolKit. The TRAI notes that the operators have already been using these platforms therefore they do not need to make additional investments.
The TRAI says its new regulations will ensure 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,” the regulatory body said.
As per new guidelines, the response time for delivery of message during mobile banking generated by either customer or the bank will be within the stipulated time frame of up to 10 seconds for SMS, IVR, WAP and STK and up to 2 seconds for USSD. The regulator has also directed that transactions such as cash deposit, cash withdrawal, money transfer and balance enquiry should be completed in not more than two stages.
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