The Reserve Bank of India has set up a Technical Committee on Mobile Banking to examine the feasibility of introducing encrypted SMS-based funds transfers across all mobile handsets.
The Committee will conduct an in-depth study of the challenges faced by banks in taking mobile banking forward and the hurdles to introducing an Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) channel for person-to-person payments.
Under consideration will be the advantages/challenges of having a single application across all handsets in an SMS encrypted environment and any other options that would take mobile banking to "every nook and corner of the country".
Committee members have been drawn from the nation's banks and payments utilities and include a representative from Vodafone. They are expected to report back in December with recommendations and a roadmap for implementation.