Mobile Money: Aircel and ICICI Join Hands To Offer Simplified Mobile Banking

We all agree Mobile banking is very convenient. Isn't it just relaxing do everything at home or for that matter in a park, maybe? Looks like Aircel and ICICI Bank have realized the potential of mobile banking. The two have joined hands to launch Mobile Money & Mobile Banking service. The service operates on Visa's Mobile Managed Service that hosts and manages the Mobile Money platform. This will prove to be a major time and resource saver for Aircel, which will mean instant, secure money transfers and easy bill payment services.

The service stresses more towards bank deprived areas of the country, where it is hard to manage finances such as reliability of intermediaries, distances of formal banking infrastructures, legitimate KYC and financial illiteracy.

The Mobile Money service will offer various financial services on a mobile phone such as cash deposits and cash withdrawals, money transfer to third parties, self-top-up of prepaid mobile credit and various other utility bill payments. The best thing is The Mobile Money is, the service is going to be instant and will require, no data connection.

Rajiv Sabharwal, Executive Director of ICICI Bank said, "ICICI Bank has been leveraging technology to provide conveniently accessible banking services in line with its financial inclusion initiative. The launch of Mobile Money is a part of this strategy, which will enable the Bank to provide reliable banking services through retail outlets of Aircel. These far-flung retail outlets will take the basic banking services to the doorsteps of the customers".

The Mobile Money service will first be available in Chennai, Tamil Nadu and will gradually be extended to other regions of the country.