India’s leading private sector bank, ICICI Bank has today announced the launch of its new services, that enables its customers to create a fixed deposit (FD), Pay utility bills, and access details of trade finance instantly on WhatsApp.
The bank in its statement said, “Retail customers can now create FDs, pay bills for electricity, cooking gas and postpaid mobile phones simply in a few clicks through WhatsApp. Corporates and owners of MSMEs can check trade finance related services like customer ID, Import Export (IE) code, limit the availability of all credit facilities availed from the Bank, status of pending inward remittances, and history of inward remittances on-the-go. The bouquet of trade finance services is available for current account customers with trade services enabled in their account.”
“Services like opening FDs and paying utility bills are available for customers. The trade finance services are being piloted with some select corporates; they will be available for all in the next few days. The service for recharge of prepaid mobile phones will also be available shortly on WhatsApp. These new services scale up the total number of banking services available to ICICI Bank customers on WhatsApp to 25. The Bank launched a host of services on WhatsApp six months ago. The list includes checking savings account balance, last three transactions, credit card limit, get details of pre-approved instant loan offers, block/unblock credit/debit card securely, the opening of instant savings account in a few minutes, opting for loan moratorium, access pdf of some prominent newspapers /magazines and locating nearby essential stores,” the statement added.
Speaking on the service launch, Bijith Bhaskar, Head of Digital Channels & Partnership, ICICI Bank said, “With the growing prominence of social media in every-day life, we believe that banking on WhatsApp offers immense convenience to our customers. It allows them to bank seamlessly while they are on WhatsApp without visiting a bank branch. Keeping the customer’s convenience in mind, we have introduced banking services on WhatsApp six months ago to help them bank conveniently and remotely without visiting the branch during the pandemic.”
“We have seen encouraging response from our customers. Over two million users have adopted banking services on WhatsApp in a short span of six months. Enthused by the response, we have added these new industry-first services. WhatsApp banking is now available for retail, NRI, Corporate, and MSME customers with a variety of services,” Bijith added.
“We believe that ‘ease of doing business’ and digitization of corporates and MSME business to endeavor, we have introduced trade-related services for proprietary corporates and MSME customers on WhatsApp. We believe them and free up their bandwidth by the elimination of branch visits which in turn, will boost their productivity and efficiency. It will redefine customers’ experience will real-time information accessible at fingerprints which are especially useful in current times,” The statement further added.