Friday, November 2, 2007

Citi and mChek Introduce Innovative Mobile Applications

Citi India announced today that is has successfully piloted an innovative solution with mChek, a leading application developer in the mobile domain. This unique application significantly enhances convenience for retail investors, who are clients of a large broker, by enabling them to respond to margin calls or enhance their trading limits, even while on the move, by authorizing a transaction simply over their mobile phone.

With over 250 million mobile subscribers in the country, more than 30 million mutual fund investors and over 5 million retail investors in the capital markets, this application can soon become the preferred mode of transacting in coming years.

Ashish Bajaj, Managing Director, Global Transaction Services, Citi India and subcontinent, said, “The development and deployment of this application continues Citi’s track record of pioneering innovations in the transaction services domain in India and set benchmarks for future industry standards. This technology has tremendous potential and can revolutionise the manner in which Customer to Business (C2B) transactions are undertaken across industries.”

Citi and mChek have earlier launched a mobile-based application enabling farmers to receive money for sale of fruits, vegetables and other commodities via their mobile phones. Using this technology, the farmers are able to receive money in the form of cash across a bank teller counter, demand drafts or account transfers to pre-registered bank accounts. More such applications are currently under various stages of development and testing.

“The mobile phone is fast becoming the ubiquitous device – particularly in emerging economies like India and most of the Asia Pacific region”, said V. Dinesh, Managing Director, Trade and Product, GTS, Citi India, “We are pleased to partner with mChek to bring this exciting solution to our customers, another example of Citi’s commitment to our customers of providing innovative, practical and secure solutions.”

All transaction applications meet stringent, international standards of security and are secured by the user’s mChekPIN, and encrypted end-to-end with 3DES encryption, ensuring banking-grade security from the convenience of the mobile phone.

“Citi and mChek are helping the investment industry make these transactions more cost effective, safe and at the same time more efficient across the value chain. The technology is simple to use and works on any mobile phone including the basic models”, said Sanjay Swamy, CEO of mChek.

About Citi

Citi, the leading global financial services company, has some 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 100 countries, providing consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, and wealth management. Major brand names under Citi's trademark red arc include Citibank, CitiFinancial, Primerica, Citi Smith Barney and Banamex. Additional information may be found at www.citigroup.com or www.citi.com.

About mChek

mChek, an ISO 27001 and PCI-DSS 1.1 company, is based in Bangalore and Mumbai, India. The company is funded by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (www.dfj.com) a leading venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. The company has developed several patent-pending applications in the areas of mobile phone based security, banking and payments. mChek’s services have been developed with several years of technology and market research and collaboration with VISA International, and brings the eco-system of telecom operators, banks, merchants and consumers together in a cohesive and win-win manner. For more information, visit http://www.mchek.com or email info@mchek.com

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