ICICI joint managing director Lalita Gupte on Friday said that the modalities were being worked out for floating such a holding company to look after e-commerce. "Eco net will facilitate ICICI to collectively do the activities related to e-commerce," she added.

Gupte, who was speaking to reporters after the inauguration of a two-day conference on "Building the E-nterprise," here organised by CII, said that setting up of eco net will not involve major investment.

"The eco net concept is quite fluid and on ICICI's table. The decision is likely in next three months," said Chanda Kochar, ICICI senior general manager. She informed that the eco net would be funded by ICICI Ltd which will be also looking for a partner in the proposed holding company.

"The idea is to bring e-commerce initiatives together under the umbrella of eco net," Kochar explained and said that it may handle ICICI's initiatives such as ICICI Direct (Web trade), M-Commerce (ICICI Bank), payment gateways (ICICI e-payments), vertical financial portal and on-line LCs, escrows.

Kochar said that it may handle other than above given activities also. The eco net will take care of its portal activities such as billjunction.com and cafejunction.com.

ICICI Direct is a pioneer in online stock broking and it would be integrated with the bank. M-Commerce will offer banking services through mobile phone while payment gateway will mainly be for facilitating secure e-commerce. The vertical financial portal will offer all retail financial products. ICICI Bank will offer Internet-enabled banking products such as online LCs, escrows.

Gupte said that the B2B e-payment portal will be ready in next 90 days. She added that ICICI is expected to set up a certification centre to take care of the security aspect during the e-payment. "ICICI and various banks may form a cartel so that the payment gateways work effectively," she added.

Earlier, in her address Gupte said that communication infrastructure, financial applications, cyberlaws and corporate transformation are the challenges in building the Indian e-enterprise. However, she hoped that with the active participation of the government and the non-government entities these challenges would be met in the due course.

Gupte stressed the need for passage of a comprehensive Cyber Laws and hoped that it would further facilitate e-commerce and e-payment in a much bigger way. "

Simultaneously, E-enterprises will get created through active collaboration of all stakeholders. To make this happen, we must have adequate infrastructure and broadband network," she opined.