Soon, Airtel users can withdraw cash using cellphones

Bharti Airtel subscribers would soon be able to withdraw cash by using their mobile phone, without going to bank branches or any ATM. The company, which recently launched Airtel Money (AM) to allow users to transfer money, as well as pay bills, is in discussion with various banks to launch the cash withdrawal service.

Under the latter service, Bharti’s retail or Airtel stores can act as banking correspondents, wherein a user can transfer money to another user, who can then go to its nearest such authorised shop to withdraw the cash.

“Infosys is our technology partner and we are testing the robustness of the platform. Parallely, we are also talking to banks, as the basic product is ready...we want to launch the cash withdrawal service as soon as possible,” K Srinivas, its president, consumer business, told Business Standard.

With AM, apart from paying electricity bills, insurance premia and recharge phones, one can transact and pay a lot of merchants, physical and online, such as flipkart.com or makemytrip.com. “Currently, we have a tie-up with yatra.com and other tie-ups will also be in place very soon,” he said.

Currently, under AM, users are allowed to send a maximum of Rs 10,000 to another AM customer and Rs 10,000 to any bank account per calendar month.