Barclays has launched Hello Money, India's first mobile banking service for customers.
The service allows customers to carry out banking transactions like fund transfers, bill payments, requests and other banking services using their mobile phones by simply dialling *598*1#.

The bank's customers can now access banking services from wherever they may happen to be.
Upon dialling *598*1#, they will be guided to the mobile-based menu to be able to choose from a number of options. Once they enter the correct Hello Money PIN, they can immediately transact using their handsets

The service is available in 40 cities in India for mobile subscribers who use Airtel, Vodafone and Idea connections on GSM compatible handsets. For a nominal monthly cost of Rs30, customers can currently choose between Hindi and English, but Barclays aims to include more languages and extend this facility to CDMA handsets, as well.

The mobile banking propositions in the market involve several steps such as application downloads, remembering SMS codes, and all sorts of numbers and formats that make it inconvenient to use.

Also, the costs for using the services are high as customers are charged for SMS or GPRS subscription every time they use the service.

The bank says its Hello Money offers a comprehensive array of banking services on a user-friendly platform that is also upgradeable into other efficient m-commerce services. The bank say this technology is being used for the first time in India for banking services, and operates on the most advanced technology available for mobile handsets - unstructured supplementary service data.