Press release from Business Wire India
Source: Bharti Airtel Limited
Friday, January 16, 2009 03:00 PM IST (09:30 AM GMT)
Editors: General: Consumer interest; Business: Advertising, PR & marketing, Business services, Information technology, Retailers, Telecommunications; Technology
Release no: 18978
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Airtel and mChek Announce Milestone of One Million Users; Introduce a Broad Range of New mCommerce Services
All New Airtel SIM Cards with pre-installed Mobile Payments Capability; Mobile Payments can now get you Flight and Movie Tickets, Recharge Toll Plaza Tickets besides Shopping from over Hundreds of Locations
New Delhi, Delhi, India, Friday, January 16, 2009 -- (Business Wire India) -- Bharti Airtel, India's leading integrated telecom services provider, today announced that more than One Million users have registered for the mChek on Airtel service, since its commercial launch in June 2008. Further, Airtel also introduced a new range of capabilities and offers for users of mChek on Airtel.
"The mChek on Airtel solution empowers an Airtel mobile user to make transactions with just an SMS, be it Prepaid recharge, Postpaid bill payment, landline bill payment or other merchant transactions like flight ticket booking, movie ticketing, insurance premium payment and toll recharge, etc." said, Sanjay Gupta, Chief Marketing Officer, Mobile Services, Airtel. "We strongly believe that mCommerce will be one of the top 3 services offered over mobile in the future and going forward it has the power to facilitate a paradigm shift in the way consumers do commercial transactions and business."
The new capabilities introduced for all mChek users on Airtel are:
-- mChekMall - a mobile mall on WAP and Java environments, bringing a range of flight ticketing, movie ticketing and other innovative services to the mobile phone.
-- Nationwide availability of the mChek on Airtel application pre-installed on all new Airtel SIM cards, allowing users with all handsets including entry-level handsets to be able to benefit from the convenience of these services in a secure manner.
-- Holiday season offers and discounts to customers from Airtel, mChek and other retailers.
mChek on Airtel was introduced in June 2008 to facilitate Mobile Bill Payment and Prepaid Recharge. Keeping with increasing demand from customers the mobile payment services through mChek have now been expanded to include insurance premium payments for ICICI Prudential, payments for the Delhi-Gurgaon toll plaza, payments at eCommerce websites such as Indiatimes shopping, Yatra.com, Futurebazaar.com, SIFYMall.com and HomeShop18.com, movie ticketing sites like BookMyShow.com, MakeMyTrip.com & Yatra.com for flight and travel ticketing and redBus.in for bus ticket booking.
Today mobile commerce, banking and payments are seen as key growth areas to improve customer service and reduce churn and also have a positive uptake on ARPU for mobile services providers.
"Consumer adoption and repeat usage of the service has been extremely encouraging", said Sanjay Swamy, CEO of mChek. "With the Reserve Bank of India's mobile payments guidelines now in place, banks and merchants are fast adopting our open-platform to build a thriving eco-system, and a compelling suite of services for consumers."
The companies also announced that looking at the success and current growth trend in the mobile payments space more banks would be introduced onto the platform allowing for many more customers to actively start using the services by linking their bank accounts or credit/debit cards.
About Bharti Airtel Limited:
Bharti Airtel Limited, a group company of Bharti Enterprises, is Asia's leading integrated telecom services provider with operations in India & Sri Lanka and has an aggregate of over 88 million customers. Bharti Airtel Limited has been voted as India's most innovative company, in a survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal.
Bharti Airtel is structured into three strategic business units - Mobile services, Telemedia services and Enterprise services. The mobile business offers services in India & Sri Lanka. The Telemedia business provides broadband & telephone services in 95 cities, DTH services and is foraying into the IPTV segment. The Enterprise business provides end-to-end telecom solutions to corporate customers and national & international long distance services to carriers. All these services are provided under the Airtel brand. Airtel's high-speed optic fibre network currently spans over 83,389 kms covering all the major cities in the country. The company has two international landing stations in Chennai that connects two submarine cable systems - i2i to Singapore and SEA-ME-WE-4 to Europe. For more information, visit www.bhartiairtel.in.
About mChek
Bangalore-based mChek (www.mchek.com) provides patent-pending, mobile-based, security and payment services enabling users to transact through their mobiles for wide-ranging day-to-day requirements including payment of utility bills, insurance policies, movie & travel ticketing, prepaid recharge and post-paid bill payment. Consumers can sign up at www.mchek.com or by sending sms 'AIRTEL' to 543219 (toll-free) from their Airtel phones. mChek's Certifications ISO 27001 and PCI-DSS 1.2 mChek's AwardsAward for "Best Billing and Customer Care Solution" from the GSM Association at the 2008 Mobile World Congress held at Barcelona .
CONTACT DETAILS
Abhinandan Saikia, Bharti Airtel Limited, +91 9871828900, abhinandan.saikia@bharti.in
Kapil Sabharwal, Comma Consulting, +91 (011) 4600 3200/ +91 9811559835, ksabharwal@comma.in
Siddharth Kumar, Comma Consulting, +91 (011) 4600 3200/ +91 9810267907, skumar@comma.in
KEYWORDS
CONSUMER, MARKETING, BUSINESS SERVICES, IT, RETAIL, TELECOMMUNICATIONS, TECHNOLOGY
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