TRAI prescribes tariff for service data-based mobile banking

Aiming to promote the use of mobile banking services across India, the telecom regulator TRAI has come out with guidelines and tariff on unstructured supplementary service data (USSD)-based mobile banking services.

USSD technology is used by telecom operators to send alerts to their users. It can be used for pre-paid call-back services, location-based content services and menu-based information services.

“We have come out with a framework to help bank agents to interface with service providers for the use of SMS, USSD and IVR channels to provide mobile banking services. The authority wants to utilise the benefits of mobile banking for financial inclusion,” TRAI Chairman Rahul Khullar said.

A large section of the population, especially in rural areas, do not have easy access to banks and this facility will help to tide over that shortcoming, he added.

The Mobile Banking (Quality of Service) (Amendment) Regulations, 2013, have come into immediate effect and the Telecommunication Tariff (56th Amendment) Order, 2013, will come into force on January 1, 2014, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said.

TRAI has prescribed the ceiling tariff for an outgoing USSD-based mobile banking service would be Rs 1.50 per USSD session.

zll service providers should facilitate not only the banks, but also the unauthorised agents of banks to use SMS, USSD and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) to provide banking services to bank customers, it said.

“On September 30, 2013, there were about 87 crore mobile subscribers in the country, of which about 35 crore were in the rural areas. The fact that a number of mobile subscribers in rural areas do not have access to banking facilities presents an opportunity for leveraging the mobile telephone to achieve the goal of financial inclusion,” TRAI said.

The authority said unlike SMSs, USSD messages create a real-time connection during a USSD session. The connection remains open, allowing a two-way exchange of a sequence of data, making USSD more responsive than services that use SMS.

Some banks in the country, such as State Bank of India (SBI) and ICICI Bank have already launched USSD-based mobile banking services.

However, the authority says the use of USSD-based mobile banking by these banks is at present limited to the provision of value-added banking services to their existing customers.

Source: http://cablequest.org/news/telecom-news/item/3703-trai-prescribes-tariff-for-service-data-based-mobile-banking.htmlSource: http://cablequest.org/news/telecom-news/item/3703-trai-prescribes-tariff-for-service-data-based-mobile-banking.html