[business]

In small, measured steps, India is marching towards m-commerce — a world where you can make all payments by keying in instructions on your mobile phone.

In developed countries (particularly Europe) it is common to find people paying for even basic purchases at shopping malls or train tickets with a few clicks of the keypad. India may not be there yet, but we have started the journey.

Barclays Bank recently launched ‘Hello Money’, a mobile banking service that enables one to do an entire gamut of things — enquiry, funds transfer, bill payments and requests for financial statements. Until this product arrived, the best ‘mobile banking’ one could do was to check bank balance or phone-in instructions to the banker. But with Hello Money, a customer of Barclays can, for example, pay his electricity bills via the mobile phone. Click a few keys and the account is debited, the bill is paid — all without any human interface. Over time, Barclays intends to enlarge the scope of this service to include payments to a whole lot of other things, such as for purchase of an air ticket.

Many other banks are in various stages of preparation to launch similar services, which are sure to become ubiquitous. South Indian Bank recently told this newspaper that it would launch similar services in two months. But Barclays is the first to get there.

While Barclays has applied to the Reserve Bank of India seeking to increase its branch network in India, it wants to simultaneously increase customer base through ‘Hello Money’, Gurumani told eWorld. “There are 230 million mobile users in India and we want a chunk of this market,” he said, without sharing any targets.

The service is currently available on Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular networks in four cities. The bank plans to launch services on other networks covering 40 cities, including making the service available on CDMA handsets.