Aircel and ICICI Bank have announced the joint launch of Mobile Money, Mobile Banking service. It runs on Visa’s Mobile Managed Service that hosts and manages the Mobile Money platform, which saves time, complexity and cost for Aircel that would require to set up a mobile payment services. It would offer safe, secure and instant money transfers, including bill payments. Airtel launched the Airtel Money, their own mobile wallet service back in 2011, and launched the Airtel Money Super Account last year, in partnership with Axis Bank.
This service is aimed at India’s unbanked areas, where it is harder to manage finances such as reliability of intermediaries, distance to formal banking infrastructure, legitimate KYC, and financial illiteracy.
The Mobile Money service offers various financial services on a mobile phone such as cash deposits and cash withdrawals, money transfer to third parties, self-reload of prepaid mobile credit, and various utility bill payments. The Mobile Money service works instantly without a data connection.
The Mobile Money service would be first available in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. It would gradually be rolled out to other parts of the state and rest of the country in 2013.