How do you do mobile baking? Well, you could use WAP. WAP hasn’t worked in India, nor in most of the world, even though there are a few good examples of WAP-based banking—such as Deutsche Bank and DBS.

SMS is the quicker way to do it: send an SMS, get a reply. You have to remember some SMS commands, so another option is the special "services" menu common on today’s 32k SIM cards. Here, you can select menu options, and the phone sends out the SMS for you. Somehow, it does it five times slower, so no one bothers to use it.

In most cases, plain old SMS is best. For instance, I’d SMS HDFCBAL to 300 (for Airtel Delhi), and get back my bank balance. TXN will list my last three transactions, a sort of mini-statement, STP 003462 will stop cheque number 003462, CHQ will request a chequebook, and so on.

Here’s how it works. I have to pay my phone bill, so I send PAY AIRT 8700 by SMS to the number 300. The SMS server routes the request to HDFC’s server, with my phone number. HDFC looks up the phone number, sees it registered to my name, finds that AIRT is my preset code for Airtel, and credits Rs 8,700 to Airtel, mentioning my phone number. I don’t specify an account number or other ID; caller ID is all that’s used.

Is this secure? Well, someone else could send commands from my phone…but it doesn’t really matter. He’d check my bank balance, or at worst make payments to my phone account. He can’t steal.

Most of the time, I use it to check my bank balance, or recent transa-ctions, or pay my phone bill, so it’s sharply cut down my visits to the ATM over the last couple of years.

Prasanto K Roy

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