ICICI, one of the largest retail banks in India, is a pioneer in internet banking in India. 20% of all customers primarily bank through the internet. However, India has about 50 million with access to ISP and over 300 million people with cell phones. ICICI launched a mobile phone service that would instantaneously inform the customers, through SMS, of any transactions made through ATM or credit card allowing the customer to know the credit or balance on the account. More than a million people subscribed to this service in less than 4 years. However, customers’ needs were not yet fulfilled. They wanted to be able to initiate the transactions themselves.

In 2008, ICICI introduced the IMobile service where a customer could download an application that allowed them to transact with the bank. This included a wide range of services. The service was popular, and more than one million customers subscribed to the service in six months.

While the service was very popular, many did not have a GPRS phone. They could download the application with a cable from a PC onto the cell phone. This was cumbersome. ICICI found that by using Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), the application could be downloaded by just dialling in a number. The product is very robust. The company decided to push the application through collaboration with telecom carriers such as Idea Fresh, Airtel Live, VodafoneLive and others. Currently, the regulators are working on new regulations for the bank to work with telecom providers and expand the scope of the service.

Source: Prahalad & Krishnan (2009)