Inclusive growth has been very high on the government’s union budget this year. Never ever it was given so much prominence. Fresh hounds from financial crisis and a double digit growth target are creating a strong need to look inward. All Indian IT majors have already started looking at Indian market in a big way. Mr FC Kohli reiterated TCS’s commitment for inclusive growth in his recent talk. RBI is working out a detailed plan for building up a huge microfinance market in India and pushing Indian banks to start working on it. Indian banks are evaluating lot of options to embark on this new challenge.
Indian banking has moved from umpteen traditional lenders to modern day banking institutions. Banks play a pivotal role in country’s economic growth. Our central bank has been actively monitoring and regulating the entire setup. Opening up of banking sector for foreign investment, emergence of new private sector banks, internet penetration and now mobile services have transformed the banking processes in a decade or so. People are talking about virtual banks with no branches, no ATMs, supported by IT systems and customer care personnel. With advancement of technology, mobile banking is just getting more attention. Can mobile banking change the dynamics of Indian banking? Can mobile banking help us in moving inwards for inclusive growth?
Let’s look at the current dynamics of mobile banking in India. As such the technology itself is in pretty nascent stage. RBI is keeping a close eye on the developments and has been evaluating strict norms for mobile banking. Telecom operators and retailers are eyeing this opportunity to increase their revenues. Tech entrepreneurs are building up their teams and setup for a viable mobile banking solution. Security solutions are also getting mature to bring about the mobile banking revolution. SMS and IVR based mobile banking solutions are already in the market. These are primarily enabling enquiry based banking transactions. 3G and broadband penetration is going to add much needed data bandwidth to numerous mobiles soon which would help WAP and standalone mobile banking applications to offer large bouquet of banking services.
Looking at mobile penetration, government policies, world economic balance and need of the hour, I personally think that mobile banking is all set to facilitate inclusive growth path in India.
2 comments:
I guess you meant Financial inclusion ..!!??
I agree, but I think to enable mobile based financial eco-system we need to have a very different architecture than currently supported by web 2.0 tecnology. 3G countries do have mobile run commerce, but it heavily depends on nice GUI and lot of to and fro data transfer. This is something which is still not possible in 2G countries (like us) and given that mostly very basic mobile sets are used, this looks a far-fetched possibility for some time, even if airtel's plan to go 3G this year comes to be true. But, yes certainly a window of opportunity exists.
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