India’s payment services provider atom technologies, a subsidiary of Financial Technologies (India) Limited, has introduced Interbank Mobile Payment Service (IMPS) to enable merchants make interbank payments 24x7 through their mobile phones.
Some significant clients who will be integrating IMPS operations in their portfolio through atom technologies are Reliance Energy-through IVR, Next Retail India Limited, Univercell Telecommunications India Private Limited, Ferns N Petals, Annamalai University etc.
YES BANK, one of atom’s key partners for IMPS operations, has stated that IMPS offerings will create the necessary transitional shift that will ascertain the transfer of funds in real time as per the requirements of the current day. Anand Bajaj, Chief Innovation Officer at YES Bank added, “We view the IMPS technology as a disruptive opportunity to change the payment landscape in India and bring down costs and improve process efficiencies, especially since the available solutions are a rehash of existing technology, deployed to suit requirements of a vast spectrum of customers - both in retail and corporate segments.”
Elaborating on this move, Dewang Neralla, Director and CEO, Atom Technologies said, “IMPS payments makes it very simple for customers to start making payments and it will also enable our merchants to accept payments from such customers which hitherto was not possible earlier due to various reasons. IMPS is a breakthrough technology that should revolutionise payments.”
IMPS is an initiative of National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the umbrella organisation for retail payments systems established by the Indian Banks’ Association (IBA). The aim of IMPS is to create an affordable and payment mechanism system to facilitate 24x7, interbank electronic fund transfer service through mobile phones. IMPS facilitates customers to use their mobile handsets as a channel for accessing their bank accounts and enables interbank fund transfers in a secured manner with immediate confirmation features.
Atom Technologies is a provider of mobile payment solutions across Internet, mobile and IVR and with IMPS coming in as an added advantage for merchants, it will provide them the access to the entire population of customers who have subscribed for mobile banking.
Currently, there are more than 900 million mobile subscribers and 40+ million people who have subscribed for mobile banking. Added advantage with IMPS is that it provides a uniform interface for making payments across different payment modes i.e. Internet, Mobile WEB, Mobile App, IVR, USSD and SMS.
To pay using IMPS, all that bank customers need to do is register for mobile banking and link their mobile phone to their bank account and generate a seven digit Mobile Money ID (MMID). Thereafter, they can easily access the bank account using only their mobile number and MMID to pay merchants.
As more organisations join the bandwagon with atom technologies, it is becoming clear that IMPS is being viewed as a progressive step that combines technology, banking operations and current new age payment solutions available to positively boost and transform the present day economic setting.