India's ICICI Bank has teamed with the country's Railways Catering And Tourism Development Corporation (IRCTC) to launch a mobile payments and ticketing system.
The m-payments service is available to subscribers of the IDEA Cellular, MTNL-Delhi & NCR and Reliance Infocomm mobile networks and allows registered customers to book and pay for train tickets using SMS text messages.
Customers can use a IRCTC short code and book their tickets with two SMS messages – for placing booking request and approving price and tickets. On the final approval, the payment will be debited to the customer's ICICI account.
Chanda Kochhar, executive director, ICICI Bank, says the service will offer customers an alternate ticket-booking channel "thus providing complete online fulfillment by enabling them to conduct their bookings with ease even when on the move".