Kotak Mahindra Bank Unveils Facebook-Based Money Transfer Service

Private sector lender Kotak Mahindra Bank (KMB) on Monday launched a Facebook-based instant fund transfer service wherein one can send money to friends on the social media network real time, for free.

"This is a bank agnostic product, the sender and the receiver may not be our account holders. We have used the IMPS platform on the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) network to make this possible," KMB's executive vice president and head of digital initiatives, Deepak Sharma, told PTI over phone.

At present, a sender can initiate fund transfer to any person through mobile phone, courtesy the IMPS infrastructure. The IMPS platform has 28 banks under it and account holders of any of these banks can use the newly launched service, Sharma said, adding that there will be no charges for either sending or receiving the money.

KMB has worked closely with the Reserve Bank and the National Payments Corporation of India for it, he said. The sender will have to register on a dedicated website for the initiative called 'KayPay' wherein he will have to give bank account details and the bank's MMID, apart from personal credentials, Sharma said.

Once registered, the sender can initiate transactions and if the beneficiary is not registered on KayPay, he will be directed to a page to register for completed a transaction. If the beneficiary is registered on KayPay, the transaction will be executed faster.

On the security front, Sharma claimed it is fully secure, even in the event of the Facebook account getting compromised as it uses two-factor authentication to complete a transaction. Additionally, there is also an expiry time for a transaction, he said.

KMB has set a limit of Rs. 2,500 per transaction and a total of Rs. 25,000 a month for sending, while a beneficiary may also not get more than Rs. 25,000 a month, Sharma said. "We wanted to make fund transfers for small amounts as less cumbersome as possible," Sharma said. It can be noted that at present, some lenders like ICICI Bank allow fund transfers for their own account holders using Facebook.

Sharma declined to give any target of the transactions which the bank is targeting, but said that the scope is vast as there are at least 250 million Facebook users in the country having a bank account, who can benefit from it.