Arundhati Bhattacharya Chairman of India’s largest bank State Bank of India has called for earmarking telecom spectrum separately for financial sector transactions so that issues such as transactions being timed out (when customers swipe their cards at POS terminals) due to lack of bandwidth to handle the large volume of transactions are effectively addressed.
Speaking at a panel discussion at an awards function on financial technology organised by the Indian Banks’ Association Bhattacharya felt that telecom companies had different aim in their mind, that is to carry voice, data, making profits besides a few of them having their own payments banks. So for them she felt that carrying financial transactions through their telecom network was not a priority.
Banks had no access to or no control over these occurrences, she pointed out. She asked “ Is it possible to have a separate spectrum only for financial transactions?” A separate network only for financial transactions. Security (of transactions) could be also done better. If we want financial transactions to be simple, easy and convenient , this is probably one way of doing it?”
She observed that there were cases of card transactions, where SMS alerts about the transaction being executed were received by the customer 24 hours after the transaction had been done.
“ Ever since demonetisation was announced and the digital transactions had spiked, the infrastructure itself, that is the spectrum on which these, the telecommunication on the basis of which all these transactions are done, the spectrum itself wasn’t sufficient to carry these transactions. As a result what was happening was that many of our transactions were getting timed out And especially for people who are new to these sort of transactions, if your transaction gets timed out once or twice a day, these are not good ways of doing business. Who wants to waste so much time just pay cash and walk away, its so much easier.”
She observed that transacting digitally had be convenient enough to be adopted by people.
“ That is not happening because the infrastructure doesn’t seem to be there,” she summed up.