India's Airtel - 1 Million Subscribers to mChek Mobile Payments
As evidence that mobile payments adoption is really happening in India, Bharti Airtel has announced that more than one million users have registered for the mChek on Airtel service since its commercial launch in June 2008.
“Consumer adoption and repeat usage of the service has been extremely encouraging”, said Sanjay Swamy, CEO of mChek. “With the Reserve Bank of India’s mobile payments guidelines now in place, banks and merchants are fast adopting our open-platform to build a thriving eco-system, and a compelling suite of services for consumers.”
“The mChek on Airtel solution empowers an Airtel mobile user to make transactions with just an SMS, be it Prepaid recharge, Postpaid bill payment, landline bill payment or other merchant transactions like flight ticket booking, movie ticketing, insurance premium payment and toll recharge, etc.” said, Sanjay Gupta, Chief Marketing Officer, Mobile Services, Airtel. “We strongly believe that mCommerce will be one of the top 3 services offered over mobile in the future and going forward it has the power to facilitate a paradigm shift in the way consumers do commercial transactions and business.”
The new capabilities introduced for all mChek users on Airtel are:
- mChekMall - a mobile mall on WAP and Java environments, bringing a range of flight ticketing, movie ticketing and other innovative services to the mobile phone.
- Nationwide availability of the mChek on Airtel application pre-installed on all new Airtel SIM cards, allowing users with all handsets including entry-level handsets to be able to benefit from the convenience of these services in a secure manner.
- Holiday season offers and discounts to customers from Airtel, mChek and other retailers.
mChek on Airtel was introduced in June 2008 to facilitate Mobile Bill Payment and Prepaid Recharge. Keeping with increasing demand from customers the mobile payment services through mChek have now been expanded to include insurance premium payments for ICICI Prudential, payments for the Delhi-Gurgaon toll plaza, payments at eCommerce websites such as Indiatimes shopping, Yatra.com, Futurebazaar.com, SIFYMall.com and HomeShop18.com, movie ticketing sites like BookMyShow.com, MakeMyTrip.com & Yatra.com for flight and travel ticketing and redBus.in for bus ticket booking.
Today mobile commerce, banking and payments are seen as key growth areas to improve customer service and reduce churn and also have a positive uptake on ARPU for mobile services providers.
The companies also announced that looking at the success and current growth trend in the mobile payments space more banks would be introduced onto the platform allowing for many more customers to actively start using the services by linking their bank accounts or credit/debit cards.
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