Citi India Enhances Payment Services With mChek

Imagine making your monthly SIP payment while on the move, or enhancing the stock trading limit by authorising a transaction on your mobile!

Citi India has successfully piloted the mChek application to provide payment services, which enable retail investors to respond real time on margin calls, or enhance their trading limits on their mobile phone.

“Corporates and retail companies, through Citi Bank and mChek can create stickiness for availing the services. The principal benefit of the service is that it enables payments on the move. One does not have to visit service providers’ branch or have to log on to the internet, to avail the service,” explained Manish Gupta, director, head-new initiatives and structured solutions global transaction services, Citi India. For instance, mChek enables one to pay the insurance premium on the move through the mobile phone. If the user is an active trader, he/she can authorise a transaction to respond to margin calls or enhance trading limits.

With over two hundred and fifty million mobile subscribers in the country, more than thirty million mutual fund investors and over five million retail investors in the capital markets, this application offers high business potential for banks.

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Service Model

mChek works on a client server model that is compliant to PCI-DSS1.1. The client can be a bank, which provides services to other partner banks or channel partners like brokerage firms and retail chains.

“The server is hosted by mChek from the datacentre at DAKC, Mumbai,” said John Kattakayam, Co-Founder & Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), mChek. The service is provided in three models. The first model is the USSD technology, which is a host-based model. Secondly, it can also be rolled out via the SDK version, wherein the mobile has a SIM card with in-built mChek functionality. Thirdly, the mobile owner can download the application on the Java platform.

The server can either be at the bank’s location, or in case of an agricultural payment application, where no bank data is verified; it can be at the service provider’s location. The server is accessible over the mobile telecommunication network using fixed line connectivity or the Internet. As soon as the transaction is initiated, the handset corresponds to the server through the mobile communication network. One can check the transaction log on a real time basis to know the time of the transaction, name of the person who initiated and authorised the transaction. This facilitates decision-making, to gain information about whether the transactions should be executed, have bounced or should be settled. These backend operations are integrated with the Citi India’s in-house applications.

“The application was tailor made for Citi Bank after a thorough vulnerability study”, said Rajarshi Chakraborty, Asst VP, Global Transaction services, Citi India. mChek has been authenticating transactions to several merchants . “We worked with them to use the same model for authorising financial transactions of varied natures."

mChek For Agriculture Payment

Earlier, the bank had launched the application designed for farmers, which enabled them to encash payments from vegetable and fruit buyers, typically retail companies in the open markets, as well as at the APMC (Agricultural product marketing committee) operational at the district or taluka level in various states.

Citi India claims to address the constraints of the farmer and the buyer with this solution . “The farmer has to spend an entire day to process a single sell-transaction, waiting for the buyer to procure cash”, emphasised Manish Gupta. The buyer’s challenge is to secure cash everyday for regular transactions. The buyer can either ask the farmer to come in the evening to collect cash, or promise immediate payment for a more reasonable deal.

Citibank addresses this challenge by enabling the farmer to encash the money from the bank. As soon as the buyer gets the delivery, he/she will issue an electronic receipt with a reference number to the farmer who will deposit the same at the bank, along with the physical receipt from the buyer. The bank will log on to the server and enter the reference number that will display the transaction details. Subsequently the farmer will receive the payment after entering a pin number.