Mumbai: Move over plastic money, debit cards, credit and shopping cards. Now a simple SMS sent via customers’ mobile phone will make all payments.
The technology introduced by mobile commerce company PayMate is already up with Citibank and retail establishments like Future Bazaar, Planet M, CRS Health and Gold Cabs.
By paying through SMS, a customer need not swipe any card, nor does he need to give out any personal information about his account or identity.
The SMS-based mobile payment solution is being seen as the safest way of making payments in wake of large number of credit card frauds coming to light.
"We would like to initially get more merchant establishments tied up with us. We may also tie up with more private and public sector banks," PayMate founder and managing director Ajay Adiseshan was quoted by news agency PTI.
The company says it expects to add over 30,000 establishments in the next few years. The procedure is simple. Customer, merchant establishments and customer's banks have to be registered with PayMate.
Once a customer is done with shopping the merchant sends his or her bill to the PayMate data centre through the Internet, EDC machine or through the mobile or landline phone.
In response, the data centre fires the customer an SMS query or an automated call asking for confirmation to pay the bill amount.
All you have to do is say or SMS a "Yes" and PayMate communicates this to the customer's bank, which in turn debits the bill amount to the merchant.
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