Why should mobile transactions be treated any differently from Internet transactions? There isn't a limit to online transactions that we know about, and a physical presence isn't needed for opening a net-banking account. In our opinion, as long as pins aren't stored in the handsets, or transmitted without encryption, there really shouldn't be a difference in outlook. The mobile banking guidelines issued by the RBI a couple of days ago have been deemed, politely, to be "Conservative", and we contacted a few stakeholders from the mobile payments space for their perspective: Probir Roy, co-founder of Paymate suggests that the registration process be made as simple as possible, and allow consumers to register remotely. The suggested ticket size of Rs. 2500 per transaction and Rs. is too small, and doesn't make it convenient to pay bills; one can't even pay for a Flight ticket with the mobile this way. He suggests that the banks should be given the freedom to set the limits. He contests the point we'd raised about issues with SMS based authentication, saying that there are other means of authentication. We're told that Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRS) is a probably a means of authenticating SMS based payments. Vijay Balakrishnan, CMO of Obopay India adds that there's an issue with mobile banking being allowed only for debit and credit card holders*, who only constitute 25 percent of the total bank account holders. The risk has been mitigated by the low transaction limits, though they want those an increase…
