India Bank's Developer Event Pays Off with a New Payment App

Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India has launched a payment service through its mobile banking app using smartphone keyboard technology developed at one of its mobile development challenge events.

ICICI Bank users in India can use their iOS smartphones to pay bills or transfer money by pressing a globe icon that delivers a SmartKeys pop-up to allow the payment services. Development of the SmartKeys and payment service occurred during the "Icic Appathon" earlier this year in Mumbai, an event the bank says drew more than 2,000 participants.

Earlier this year, ICICI Bank put itself in the forefront of mobile commerce in India when it launched what it was calling the first Host Card Emulation-based contactless mobile wallet in the country. Host Card Emulation technology allows the bank to offer contactless Near Field Communication payments through customers' phones, while bypassing the storage of credentials on a handset's secure element.

The bank plans to add the new SmartKeys service to Android phones in the near future, saying those users will have to shake the phone when on the mobile banking app to get the screen to change to the SmartKeys.

"With India becoming the second largest market globally in terms of mobile subscribers as well as smartphones, we are witnessing a paradigm shift in consumer preferences towards doing everything ‘on-the-go’," B. Madhivanan, chief technology and digital officer at Icici, stated in an Aug. 22 press release.

The new service boosts the bank's effort in offering new solutions, thus "making mobile banking simpler than ever before," Madhivanan added.