The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued new regulations on mobile banking to ensure faster and reliable communication for enabling banking through mobile phones. It has prescribed norms for telcos for facilitating communication related to banking and parameters for quality of service. We believe that these regulations were long due, and would specially benefit online transactions, since they require an OTP (one time password), which is delivered through mobile networks. At times, the non-delivery of these transactional messages lead to failed transactions. It all depends on how service providers make changes to abide by these regulations. Here are some of the highlights of the TRAI regulations on Mobile Banking: On mode of delivery & time frame - Every Access Provider acting as a bearer, needs to facilitate banks to use SMS (Text Messages), USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) to provide banking services to its customers. Access providers can also optionally allow banks to use WAP or STK (SIM Application Toolkit) to provide banking services to their customers. - The bank generated message should be delivered to the customer by the access provider within a prescribed time frame of less than or equal to 10 seconds for SMS, IVR, WAP and STK and less than or equal to two seconds for USSD. In case SMS is used for the transaction, the access provider should ensure that the message is treated as a transactional message and is sent through separate telecom resources. In addition, the access provider also…
