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Friday March 29, 2024

USSD interoperability hits snags

LAHORE: Cellular industry of Pakistan is resisting the unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) interoperability, which hampers the mobile branchless banking growth and upsets the objective of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) to bank the unbanked population, official sources said. An industry official said USSD is a unique selling

By Jawwad Rizvi
June 30, 2015
LAHORE: Cellular industry of Pakistan is resisting the unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) interoperability, which hampers the mobile branchless banking growth and upsets the objective of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) to bank the unbanked population, official sources said.
An industry official said USSD is a unique selling point for the cellular operators as compared to commercial banks and therefore they are against it.
A spokesperson of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said cellular industry and commercial banks need to cooperate with each other to move on application-based access rather than sticking to USSD.
The application-based agreements will help both of them, he said. “Commercial banks do internet banking, while mobile companies will have more data users. Both should sponsor the smart phones for their joint customers.”
The industry official, however, said reluctance of the industry to USSD interoperability, despite the pressure of the SBP is that the operators don’t want to lose their comparative advantage to commercial banks.
He added that limited interoperability is adopted by the industry and any mobile wallet user can send money to or deposit fund to bank accounts through mobile financial services agents.
However, the official admitted that the industry is reluctant for complete interoperability of the USSD with commercial banks.
The SBP officials said the commercial banks want the USSD interoperability for branchless banking but the mobile operators are resisting USSD interoperability for branchless banking for unknown fear of losing their mobile banking customers. An official, providing mobile banking backend services both to commercial banks and cellular industry, said telecom industry has been caught in an unknown fear of losing the business, which is untrue.
He said Bangladesh Central Bank, through the mobile financial regulations in 2011, increased the branchless banking manifolds, while a large number of unbanked Bangladeshis have been banked after introduction of interoperability of USSD for commercial banks.
“This will be the case in Pakistan if open-minded policy will be adopted,” he said.