Payments made via mobile devices are becoming an increasingly popular service. Select carriers around the world have already made the option available to their customers. UK is also on its way to make the option available with a number of its financial institutions so that UK mobile users will be able to send and receive payments via text messages.
This has been announced by the UK Payments Council. Currently, the plan is backed by eight major financial institutions in the country and it is expected that the feature would become available with UK users finally by 2014.
The technology has long been in use in a number of developing nations. It provides an easy and cheap way to transfer money without requiring banking infrastructure in all places. In UK, this wouldn’t be the first banking-related feature made available to mobile users in UK. Barclays already allows its customers to send and receive money from their accounts via mobile devices.
The best part about this new via-text payment option is that it wouldn’t require the customers to set up an account with a given mobile wallet service. To make use of the system, a customer will only need to give his phone number to the payee. The payee, in turn, would send his payment to that specific number.
Faster Payments service will be overlooking this feature once it is implemented. The entity has yet to decide what kind of security measures must be put in place to avoid its abuse as well as the maximum amount of money that can be transferred.
Courtesy: BBC
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