PTI
Mumbai
Country's largest private sector lender ICICI Bank Tuesday launched a smartphone-based application which will allow users to pay for purchases by simply tapping their smartphones on a merchant terminal at a shop.
The service will soon be made available for over 35 million debit and credit card holders of the lender, ICICI Bank's Executive Director Rajiv Sabahrwal told reporters on a concall.
“With India becoming the second largest market globally for mobile subscribers as well as smartphones, we expect this to be a big game changer in the Indian payment industry,” he said.
Sabahrwal explained that the service makes use of the Host Card Emulation (HCE) technology, which creates 'virtual' cards for 'physical' credit or debit cards issued by the Bank.
The customer will have to download the bank's 'Pockets' application on his mobile phone and then select the 'Touch and Pay' icon from the menu.
Sabahrwal said at present there are 40,000 merchant locations accepting NFC-based payments and expects the number to go up to 1 lakh in up to four months.
Other lenders, including the country's largest lender State Bank of India, have launched NFC-based cards.
