But before you assume that things are hot and moving on this front, check out the catch—even this number of 120,000 represents only 1% of the overall mobile user base. Also, a majority of those who do use mobile banking services only do it to check account balance, with very few actually conducting transactions. Reasons for this—lack of awareness of services offered by banks, and equally important, a perceived issue of security and confidentiality. Clearly, banks have not done enough to push their bouquet of mobile banking services. Even our survey—despite targeting a respondent profile that would bring in more positive answers than negative (see Methodology), threw up very low usage numbers.

Also, e-commerce as a medium of purchasing and transacting has not really caught on, and the basket of mobile banking offerings is, in itself, very limited. The good news—the technology backbone is in place, and getting better. There’s CDMA, there’s GSM. Forget their battles on the mobile telephony front—from the consumer’s point of view, he never had it so good.

 "The recent price cuts are also likely to help," say banking experts, adding that this will lead to "increasing willingness to move on to mobiles, and therefore, to the value-added services that most operators offer today". If you have a head that likes numbers, then get a load of this—Cellular Operators’ Association of India figures show a growth in subscriber base from 700,000 in December 1997 to over 1 crore in December 2002… that’s growth of over 1300%!