ICICI Bank has unveiled the country’s first contactless mobile payment solution to enable its credit and debit customers make in-store contactless payments by just waving their smartphones near an NFC-enabled merchant terminal. The mobile payment solution available in the Bank’s ‘Pockets’ app, provides improved convenience of ‘Touch & Pay’ as customers are no longer required to carry physical card or cash to pay in stores.

ICICI Bank is the first financial institution in the country to leverage the Host Card Emulation (HCE) technology to bring forth this solution.

About HCE Technology

• The HCE technology creates ‘virtual’ cards for ‘physical’ credit or debit cards (Visa/MasterCard) of the Bank, as selected by the customer.
• The virtual card resides in the Bank’s secure cloud server. Using the virtual cards, an ICICI Bank customer can initiate electronic payments from NFC enabled smartphones by just waving his/her phone near a contactless merchant terminal.
• While the virtual card bears a different card number, the credit limit and expiry date remains same as the original physical card.

The solution offers enhanced security as the customer’s card details are stored virtually in the Bank’s secure cloud server and not on the customer’s mobile phone. Additionally, the display of the card on the smartphone shows only last four digits of the virtual card.

Security Features

Thus, even if a customer loses his/her mobile phone, he/she will not lose any confidential information about his/her original and virtual card. Further, for each payment via the virtual card, a one-time unique token number is created by the Bank’s server, which is encrypted and sent to the merchant’s terminal, without disclosing any information of the card. ICICI Bank has developed this platform in-house, based on the HCE.

This mobile payment solution has been launched today for the employees of the Bank. It will be available for customers in the last week of March when the updated ‘Pockets’ application will be available on Google Play Store.

Did You Know?

ICICI Bank launched ‘Pockets’, India’s first digital bank on mobile phone last year. It has registered over 3.3 million downloads. The Bank is also the numero uno bank in the Indian mobile banking industry with over Rs 56,000 crore worth of transactions till November 2015 in FY’16 (as per the latest available report on the RBI website)