Chennai, Oct 29 (PTI) The Mobile Payment Forum of India(MPFI), a think tank, has set its eyes on coming out with anumber of user-friendly features like voice-basedauthentication, a top official said.
A joint initiative of the Institute for Development andResearch in Banking Technology, Hyderabad and Rural TechnologyBusiness Incubator, IIT Madras, MPFI's mission "is to enablemobile payments and financial services through secure,efficient and low cost transaction." It played a key role in developing interoperability andsecurity standards for Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), thebasic platform for mobile payments, and later the UnifiedPayments Interface (UPI), built using IMPS.
MPFI's stakeholders include policy makers, banks, telcosand others.
"MPFI will focus on futuristic solutions such as voicebased authentication and security and privacy, among others,"MPFI Chairman Gaurav Raina said.
As a solutions oriented think tank, MPFI was looking atissues across policy, business and technology over short,medium and long-term horizons, he said during an interactionwith PTI.
Raina, a Professor at Indian Institute of Technology,Madras (IIT-M), said others like creating user awareness,simplifying message formats for SMS banking, proximitypayments and Near Field Communication (tap and pay) would alsobe taken up in the coming months.
For instance, MPFI was working towards standardisation ofmessage formats for SMS banking across banks, he said.
"Not everyone has a smartphone.. Connectivity could bepatchy although it is getting better.. SMS as a channel for atleast basic financial services should be promoted and needsstandardisation," he explained.
For example, one mastercode could be used across banksfor account balance purposes, Raina said.
On voice-based authentication, he said it was beingassumed that there was a certain level of literacy whenever afinancial transaction is done, but the aim was to make iteasier for more and more people.
Further, elderly people may not be comfortable with otherkinds of technology, he said.
"So can we not think of a world where voice plays a veryimportant role in banking," he said on efforts on designingvoice-based authentication.
MPFI will focus on developing such features over thecoming years, he said.
Giving statistics, Raina said that in August 2017 alone,there were over 90 million financial transactions using IMPSand UPI.
As many as 500 million transactions were done on IMPSin FY 2016-17, he said.
"These massive growth numbers are but a small indicationof the tremendous potential for mobile payments in the Indianeconomy," he said. PTI SA APRROH.
This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.