ICICI iMobile offers much more than banking

— Abonty Banerjee

General Manager and Head, Digital Channels, ICICI Bank

Dataquest had a conversation with ICICI Bank’s General Manager and Digital Channel Head Abonty Banerjee on how ICICI bank is betting big on mobile banking. She runs us through the various mobile banking initiatives which the bank has taken to boost its presence on the platform. Excerpts

How is iMobile app enabling its customers?

‘iMobile’ is ICICI bank’s mobile banking application that allows customers to perform banking functions on their mobile device. We were the first in the country to launch this mobile banking application in 2008. Using this app, our customers can conduct an array of financial and non-financial transactions like fund transfer, pay bills, open fixed deposits, recharge mobile or DTH connections and view account balance, among others, at their convenience, anytime and anywhere. It also helps the customer to locate the bank’s branch or ATM in a particular location, track payments, and check status of service requests. The customer can also apply for a new account, home loan and car loan through this application.

How is this app different from your competitor banks?

iMobile offers much more than banking with utmost ease. Customers can pay bills for some key billers without any pre-registration. For example, one can pay telecom bills, electricity bills, water and insurance bills. The app even helps to book movie tickets, bus tickets and flight tickets.

ICICI bank is the first to offer banking services on multiple channels of mobile banking like SMS, call, IVR, app, and browser.

Since you’ve launched it now on Windows platform, how does it promise seamless and mobile banking experience to Windows phone users?

The new Windows app aims to enhance customer experience through a new user interface on the Windows tile format and one touch access to important services. The app brings forth a new and unique function for mobile/DTH recharge, which lets the user select their favorite past recharge transaction and do a recharge quickly without having to enter details again. Customers can now, directly call the customer care from the app itself for immediate help, which is yet another interesting feature of the app.

Other key features of the app include fund transfer, bill payment and view of account details across savings, current account, fixed and recurring deposit, credit cards, loans, demat and Public Provident Fund relationships.

What is the percentage of transactions that take place through iMobile app for ICICI Bank?

ICICI bank is the leader in India’s mobile banking industry with over one-fourth of the market share, in terms of value. Today, one of every fourtheenth retail banking transaction of the bank originates from the iMobile app. With more and more mobile banking penetration, the user base is also growing many folds. We have close to 2 mn customers using this service.

What’s the platform ICICI bank using? How secured is it?

ICICI bank is using the CSam platform for its Android, iOS, and Java application. For Windows, the platform used is Snapworks.

Transacting with iMobile is completely safe and secure, which is ensured through a number of security measures namely:

Mobile number registration: The activation of the app is allowed only on the phone number of the customer registered for mobile banking services with the bank.

Grid card authentication: Customer has to activate iMobile app using another authentication, which is the digits on the back of the debit card. This ensures that only the rightful owner of the account who has the debit card of the bank can activate iMobile on their phone.

User generated PIN: Customer is required to create a 4-digit numeric PIN of his choice to log in. This acts as a verification mechanism to enter the application. The application gets locked in case of three incorrect PIN entries.

For Windows platform, users can activate their app, by logging into iMobile, using their Internet banking user id and password.

Every transaction on iMobile follows the same stringent measures as Internet banking with no sensitive information being stored on the mobile handset.