Telecom Lead India: Mobile VAS provider Mahindra Comviva has signed mobile banking deal with Kyrgyz Investment Credit Bank.
With this, KICB becomes first Bank to introduce mobile banking and payments services in Kyrgyzstan, powered by Mahindra Comviva’s mobiquity solution.
THE growth of mobile money will continue at a rapid rate this year, global mobile industry body GSMA said in a recently released report titled The Economy of Mobile 2013.
More than 2.5-billion adults — the majority of whom live in developing economies — do not have access to a formal bank account, according to the World Bank.
This means about 48 percent of the world’s adult population is not able to access basic financial services in order to save, borrow or transact, says GSMA.
Mahindra Comviva’s mobiquity mobile banking solution will empower KICB customers to conduct financial and nonfinancial transactions.
The bank is currently looking to partner with multiple remittance service providers to enable both inward and outward remittance in the region.
Srinivas Nidugondi, head of Mobile Financial Solutions at Mahindra Comviva, said: “Our solution will allow bank to offer an intuitive and superior user experience to its customers so that they can conduct a range of financial and nonfinancial transactions on the go.”
Kwang-Young Choi, CEO, Kyrgyz Investment Credit Bank, said: “Our aim is to provide a cost-effective banking solution and improving people’s lives by allowing the mobile banking application to be leveraged as a complete self-service channel for various banking and payments related requirements.”
GSMA said in its mobile banking report that the prohibitively high cost of a traditional, physical bank branch and the lack of other basic infrastructure, such as point-of-sale terminals, have until recently made the provision of such services impossible to a significant section of the world’s population.
Mahindra Comviva’s mobile banking solution allows banks to offer banking and payment services across a range of devices and channels such as client apps, SMS, USSD, IVR, QR Codes and NFC.
GSMA expects mobile money adoption to rise along with growth in new mobile connections in developing economies. There are 3.2 billion mobile customers globally. A further 700-million subscribers are expected to be added by 2017 and the 4-billion mark to be passed in 2018.
