Saturday 19 June 2010

INDIA: Telcos can’t offer mobile banking

Hyderabad, June 18: Here is a piece of bad news for mobile operators, who want to tap the huge market for mobile ba-nking: The Reserve Bank of India does not want to delink banks from the mobile banking and wants mobile service providers to tie up with banks for offering banking services on mobile phones.

Mobile operators have be-en eager to offer banking as a value added service and wanted RBI to allow small ticket transactions such as payments below Rs 500 through mobile phones. Such measures mobile operators argue would made financial inclusion easier.
However, RBI thinks mobile operator-led financial inclusion is a just remittance system.“We want our financial inclusion to be more than just a remittance facility. We want our customers to get minumum services like deposit insurance, access to affordable credit and payment system, which only banks can offer,” RBI governor, Dr D. Subbarao, said.

Apart from this, he said a bank led model is decidedly safer and more sustainable in the backdrop of the concerns about money laundering and financing of terrorism. “We do recoginise the mobile telephony has an important role are keen that service providers collaborate with banks to provide services,” he said. Source

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