Allahabad Bank to launch mobile banking in April

Public sector Allahabad Bank will launch mobile banking in April 2011, enabling its customers to avail banking services on their cellphones.

Currently, the bank is collecting the mobile phone numbers of its customers.

“The software platform for providing the mobile banking facility has already been tested and we will launch the services in April,” bank CMD J P Dua told Business Standard here.

He informed, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had already permitted the bank to launch its mobile banking platform.

The bank will also launch a mobile van for dispensing banking facilities in Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh.

“Under a pilot project, the first such mobile van was launched in Dumka (Jharkhand) to provide banking services in 12 villages,” he informed.

Dua was in town recently for reviewing the bank’s performance in different zones and lead districts of the state.

He said, Uttar Pradesh was a focus area for the bank, since almost a third of its total branches was based here. The state has a network of 723 branches of the total 2,400 branches in India.

The bank is targeting a total network of 3,000 branches and business of Rs 4 lakh crore in the next three years. In the current financial year, the bank is looking at a business of Rs 2.2 lakh crore.

Besides, the bank proposes to increase its number of automated teller machines (ATMs), including bio-metric ATMs pan-India. The state alone would get 150 new ATMs and 150 new branches in the near future.

The total Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises credit outstanding in Uttar Pradesh stands at Rs 2,150 crore and the credit growth is about 30 per cent, Dua added.