Now SMS Your Premium Payment

Mobile commerce or m-commerce is part of the shift of technology into mainstream business and everyday life. It’s about purchase and sale of goods and services through one’s mobile handset via a financial institution. In one such endeavour to help customers, ICICI Prudential Life has launched SMS-based premium payments in collaboration with mChek. With this new initiative ICICI Prudential has added another feather to its cap.

Innovation is the Driver

“ICICI Prudential has been a pioneer in driving innovation in this segment and we would like to focus all innovations centered on convenience to our customers,” says Anita Pai, Executive VP, Customer Service & Technology. Pai has been a dynamic force at ICICI Prudential in this initiative and others. With the driving need being innovation and customer ease, ICICI Prudential Life has made banking a lot more convenient for its customers.

mChek’s John Kattakayam is enthusiastic, as he feels the days of paper banking are short-lived and leading banks will need to opt for alternative methods of payment. mChek already has a Java-based application in place, with which the process of making payments is securely done via GPRS. Those who don’t have the GPRS service enabled can register at the mChek website and get a unique PIN with which they can pay Airtel bills and also the premium payments for ICICI Prudential.

All that a customer needs to do is send a message to 56767, which is ICICI’s short code, and make the payment. As soon as authentication is done with the PIN, the payment is debited from your bank account or credit card straight away.

Integrating Challenges

Offering such convenience to customers is bound to occasion a rather complicated backend, to ensure the services are up and running 24x7. Security is the highest priority, as a simple text message can transfer money. “We have a team that monitors the overall security aspect of the entire transaction, from the time a text message is sent to the time it hits the mChek platform and till it reaches the payment gateway,” assures Kattakayam, who is also the CISO of mChek.

All transaction applications meet stringent, international standards of security, and users are secured by their unique mChek PIN. Also, encrypted end-to-end transactions with 3DES encryption ensures banking-grade security, even from the convenience of the mobile phone.

According to Anita Pai, the real challenge was to integrate the short codes. “We wanted our customers to use the standard short code 56767 while dealing with ICICI prudential.” She feels this was the only real challenge, apart from the pressure to launch the service as quickly as possible (by December). This meant the business would profit from those customers who wished to invest in insurance to save tax. The idea was that this would see maximum payments coming in, enabling the new mobile channel to add strategic benefit to ICICI’s business plans.

Financial Inclusion Now Possible

M-commerce is seen as the way to reach the ‘unbanked’ population of India, and with the growing number of mobile phone users this is becoming more imperative. ICICI Prudential has used innovation as a weapon to increase the channels available to customers who wish to make payments on time, without defaulting. The implementation is a definite success… not just because of the increased business, but also the attempt to change the traditional end-user tools to offer innovative solutions to meet customer requirements.