The Reserve Bank of India, late last month, removed the Rs 50,000 per-customer-per-day transaction cap it had placed on mobile payments in India, and asked banks to choose their own transaction limits, based on their own risk perception. Mobile banking hasn't quite taken off in India, and even though it is showing an up-trend, the growth has been fairly limited: In a recent speech, G.Padmanabhan, Executive Director, Reserve Bank of India, disclosed that during October 2011, over 22.1 lakh transactions took place, and almost Rs 161 crore was transacted; over 96 lakh bank customers have so far registered for the mobile banking service, according to the RBI. This is higher than the last dataset that we had reported: for August 2011, banks had reported 18.92 lakh mobile transactions, and Rs 124.86 crore in amount transacted. G.Padmanabhan said that 96 lakh bank customers have so far registered for mobile banking service, but pointed out that these numbers are "not really heartening if we juxtapose them with the data on the number of bank accounts and the mobile subscriber base. They seem like a drop in the ocean! What this means is that banks have not really made a significant penetration even amongst their existing customers to extend mobile banking services." Padmanabhan's views are not new to us: the RBI's Deputy Governor Dr. K.C. Chakrabarty had said much the same in December 2009 at the India Telecom conference. However, unlike Chakrabarty, who focused on structural issues hindering the growth of mobile banking,…
