India Mobile Banking Gets Boost from Bharti Airtel and Vodafone

“Mobile payments will be the next step for delivering financial services to hundreds of millions of 'underbanked' people or those who are under-served currently, both urban and rural customers, especially in emerging economies," says Gerhard Romen, Director, Mobile Financial Services, Nokia.

Recently, mobile banking got a huge boost with Bharti Airtel and Vodafone announcing separate partnerships with State Bank of India and ICICI Bank, respectively. While Bharti Airtel and SBI have formed an exclusive joint venture, Vodafone has agreed to become a "business correspondent" for ICICI Bank.

While Vodafone manages over 1.5 million retail points for acquiring customers and servicing them, Airtel is present across 5,101 towns and more than 5,00,000 villages. That's a big deal considering that 51.4 percent of 89.3 million farmer households do not have access to any credit from institutional or non-institutional sources. 

Only 27 per cent of farm households are indebted to formal sources. Only 13 per cent are availing loans from the banks in the income bracket of less than Rs 50,000. 

There's money in the mobile