ICICI Bank : iMobile

Mobile phones are fast becoming the channel of choice for conducting

last-mile, end-user transactions. Keeping this in mind, banks are fast pushing

across the entire gamut of retail banking services to customer's mobiles.

However, the proliferation of individual business units within large banks such

as ICICI has led to multiple product offerings being pitched to the customer.

However, each business group has designed mobile experience in isolation of the

other, thereby seriously impacting customer-level usability.

So ICICI has launched a new application called iMobile which lets you manage

nearly all of your banking needs through a Java enabled mobile phone. The

application is developed in Java and hence most of the phones today can run

these applications natively.

The application can be downloaded by sending an sms to the ICICIBank SMS

gateway. Once you do that you will receive a reply with a URL. Going to this URL

will initiate the download of the application compatible for your phone. You can

even download it using a PC and then push it to the phone.

The application essentially works on GPRS. But if GPRS is not available it

can also work through SMS. And to make the transaction completely secure, it

uses encrypted SMS for communicating with the server. And hence this application

can run both through SMS and GPRS. With this, it really becomes possible for one

to use his ICICI accounts from anywhere around the world, if a GSM network is

available there.

The application lets you access your banking, credit card, loan and demat

account from a single interface. You can even pay your presentment and payment

bills from this application. The application is secured with a four digit PIN

number which is created when you run this application for the first time. Plus

while doing any transaction, the application asks random numbers form the ICICI

grid card provided along with the account.

Indranil Ghosh, Asst General Manager

The penetration of Internet and PCs are still less than mobile phones in the

country and with a banking application for mobile phones, with most of the

features that one can get from a PC, it's really going to reduce the queues at

the ICICIbank counters.