MUMBAI, INDIA: India consumers will now be able to transfer money from their accounts to any other account in the country using their cellphones via the National Payment Corporation of India's Inter-bank Mobile Payment Service.

Seven banks including HDFC, ICICI, AXIS and SBI have gone live with the new system. Seven more banks are in the process of activating the service and 22 others expected to join the network soon, according to the NPCI.

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The NPCI is the umbrella organization for all retail payment systems in the country owned and operated by banks.The system is as secure as net-banking.The major advantage of IMPS is that a customer does not have to use a computer or an internet-enabled phone to transfer funds.

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Mobile phone user will have to download the mobile banking application on his instrument to remit money.Even low-end phones will be able to undertake this transfer either through download,Bluetooth or even by making a simple application at the nearest branch of the bank.

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According to NPCI, there are 600+ million mobile subscriptions in India and is considered more than the number of bank accounts. The sending/remitting customer just needs to know the mobile number and the Mobile Money ID (MMID) of the receiver /beneficiary for IMPS transfers and the money can be transferred instantly.

Mobile Money Transfer Identifier (MMID) is a concept formulated by MPFI and adopted by NPCI and participating banks. It takes care of linking multiple accounts to a mobile, ensuring only people who are registered for receiving
will receive money and avoids erroneous transfers to a large extent.

IMPS rides on the existing NFS Interbank ATM transaction switching infrastructure and the message format which was co-developed with MPFI. NFS currently has 51 member banks and the number is increasing every month. IMPS
thus has the potential for the wide reach across the country, is easy for banking industry to adopt and if the bank has the mobile banking solution already, only minimal changes are required at the bank’s end to implement this
service.

IMPS vision is to help migration of paper based payments to electronic payments, and provide cost effective, safe and fast payment options for larger sections of the society using ubiquitous mobile phones and leverage the technology available with all banks.