After receiving a good response from its trial study in Bangalore, Citibank is intending to increase its mobile payment service to other cities of the country and abroad.
This decision was based on the results of the study conducted at Bangalore in July. The bank had commenced using mobile phones for credit card payments at retail outlets and other POS outlets.
The service is called “Citi Tap and Pay”. The bank worked on the usage of mobile phones with NFC (Near Field Communications). NFC is a wireless connectivity service for short range that sets up contact with electronic devices. As it permits wireless communication, the service is called ‘contactless’.
Vijay Ramchandran, chief marketing officer of Citi South Asia said, “Our experience during the pilot has been remarkable in terms of the customer adoption and usage which were significantly higher than we had expected”.
The study revealed that the number of dealings by clients on mobile phones was 6 times that involved using credit cards. It implied that the contactless payments were substituting either rivals’ cards or cash transactions, said Ramchandran.
Citibank is now looking to increase the services to other cities in India. For that it will require more NFC enabled devices and handsets and so have to get more merchants to install NFC-enabled readers, Ramchandran said.