The Reserve Bank of India has asked banks to keep their mobile payment services on holds until final guidelines are issued. However, mobile alerts for credit/debit, balance enquiry and other are service in the nature of providing information will be continued to be made available reports BS.

Importantly, all mobile-based money transfer services that have not received “explicit approval” from the regulator are to be suspended. On the operator end, Airtel has recently put in a huge marketing thrust for its mobile banking service. However, they claim in the report that they are merely passing on information and this move is aimed towards those services that need money to be transferred to a master account before payments being made. On the banking front, ICICI claims its mobile banking facility, which enables internal account transactions, falls within the guidelines and is hence complaint. No comments as yet from mobile payment services providers. Will update as we have it.

With reference to the norms, the final guidelines are expected in two weeks, in time for various public sector banks like SBI and Union bank to launch their own mobile banking services.

We had previously covered the draft norms here.

• RBI Drafts Norms On Mobile Payment For Banks