India’s largest private sector player in the banking sector, ICICI Bank, has launched a service through which, Twitter users in India can send money to each other through the social media site itself.
By doing so, ICICI bank becomes the first bank in India that lets users perform transactions via Twitter. The philosophy here is pretty simple though, ‘people can do banking while socializing now’.
It’s not just that customers can only send money to each other, they can also check their account balance, check their last three transactions and there’s an option to recharge prepaid mobiles too.
However, this isn’t the first time that ICICI has introduced banking through social media. ICICI had already launched an app on Facebook in September 2013 for sharing money with friends and FB groups. This was a revised app while it’s predecessor was already proving facilities like checking your account balance and order cheque books while using Facebook.
There are around 83 million Twitter users in India which sometimes may fall to 33 million active users (still a lot of people to target though). People can receive money through Twitter even if they don’t gave a savings account in the ICICI bank.
Rajiv Sabharwal, Exeucitve Director at ICICI Bank said,
With the growing prominence of social media in every-day life, we believe our customers would be delighted to have yet another avenue which allows them to bank while they are on social media. Now, ‘icicibankpay’ will help our customers to execute banking transactions while they are socializing on Twitter. This innovation is in line with our philosophy of ‘khayaal aapka’ wherein we offer products and services which make banking easier and more convenient for our customers.”
