ICICI Bank launches contactless mobile payments solution

Through virtual cards, customers can initiate electronic payments from NFC enabled smartphones by just waving their phones near a contactless merchant terminal

ICICI Bank, the country’s largest private sector lender, has launched a mobile solution that allows customers to make payments with their linked cards to the bank’s “Pockets” offering, by just tapping the mobile phone. Rajiv Sabharwal, executive director, ICICI Bank said this was one step ahead of the tap-and-pay solution the bank had been offering.

“Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled cards was introduced earlier but this is a step ahead. With this, you don’t need to have your card with you at the time of making a payment as long as the card is linked to Pockets.” Pockets, is a digital banking service offered by ICICI Bank which has had about 3.3 million downloads so far.

NFC employs radio transmission to ascertain contact when the cards are tapped or waved near a terminal. However, apart from NFC the bank is also using Host Card Emulation (HCE) technology for this offering.

The HCE technology creates 'virtual' cards for 'physical' credit or debit cards (Visa/MasterCard) of the Bank, as selected by the customer.

This virtual card will reside in the bank's secure cloud server. By using the virtual cards, an ICICI Bank customer can initiate electronic payments from NFC enabled smartphones by just waving his/her phone near a contactless merchant terminal.

While the virtual card bears a different card number, the credit limit and expiry date remains same as the original physical card, said the lender explaining how the card functions.

With these cards, as per the Reserve Bank of India guidelines the maximum amount allowed in a single transaction is Rs 2,000.

This comes at a part of the bank's focus on increasing technology. As per the RBI data, till November the lender has clocked in Rs 56,000 crore worth of transactions.