HDFC plans mobile wallets, remittances

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Mumbai, Dec 5 : HDFC Bank, which already provides mobile banking facilities, is now planning to foray into mobile wallets. These will enable customers to use their mobile phones for transactions instead of carrying the debit or credit cards.

“Our mobile banking users has doubled in less than six months of this year and with the growing trend, we are planning to introduce mobile wallets and remittances soon,” said HDFC Bank executive vice-president, retail banking, Rahul N Bhagat at the Banktech Congress in Mumbai.

“We are looking at getting debit-card and credit-card services on mobile phones for transactions and introduce it in the rural areas,” he added. The bank is also focusing aggressively on ATM expansion. Talking about the increasing number of banks redying to tap this market in the coming years, “Service providers are estimating mobile users to touch 250 million by 2011 and bankers are trying to tap the potential by making it more transaction based, from just information based,” Ngpay vice-president Abhijit Bose said.

As mobile prices and tariffs are going down, mobile connections are touching around 6 million users per month in the country, Bhagat added. Mobile banking benefits both the banks and the customers, as the use of mobile banking reduces the operational costs for the banks. “In India, there are around 650 million people who are yet to use banking services and with the growing success in mobile banking, it will empower around 11.7 million merchants to accept mobile payments,” Obopay Mobile Technologies Pvt Ltd, executive director, CTO, Aditya D Menon said.