ICICI Bank announces new services available on WhatsApp

By Edil Corneille

Today, India’s ICICI Bank announced the launch of its services that enable customers to create fixed deposits, pay utility bills and access details of trade finance instantly on WhatsApp. These new services offer convenience to ICICI Bank’s customers in a way where they can undertake an array of banking requirements from their home or office while maintaining social distance. This holds significance amid the current COVID-19 pandemic.

ICICI Bank’s retail customers can now create FDs; pay bills for electricity, cooking gas and postpaid mobile phones, in a few clicks through WhatsApp. Corporates and owners of MSMEs can check trade finance related services like customer ID, Import Export (IE) code, the limit availability of all credit facilities availed from the bank, the status of pending inward remittances and history of inward remittances on-the-go. The bouquet of trade finance services by ICICI is available for current account customers with trade services enabled in their account.

Bijith Bhaskar, Head- Digital Channels & Partnership, ICICI Bank explicated, “With the growing prominence of social media in every-day life, we believe that banking on WhatsApp offers immense convenience to our customers. It allows them to bank seamlessly while they are on WhatsApp, without visiting a bank branch. Keeping the customers convenience in mind, we have introduced banking services on WhatsApp six months ago to help them bank conveniently and remotely without visiting the branch during the pandemic. We have seen encouraging response from our customers. Over two million users have adopted banking services on WhatsApp in a short span of six months. Enthused by the response, we have added these new industry-first services. WhatsApp Banking is now available for retail, NRI, corporate and MSME customers with a variety of services.
The new financial transaction services allow customers to instantly create fixed deposit and pay their utility bills from WhatsApp with just few simple steps.

We believe that ‘ease of doing business’ and ‘digitisation’ are key parameters for the growth of the corporates and MSME businesses. To this endeavour, we have introduced trade related services for proprietors, corporates and MSME customers on WhatsApp. We believe that this service will make banking easier to them and free up their bandwidth by elimination of branch visits which, in turn, will boost their productivity and efficiency. It will redefine customer experience with real-time information accessible at fingertips which is especially useful in current times.”

Services like opening FDs and paying utility bills are available now for ICICI Bank’s customers. The trade finance services are being piloted with some select corporates; they will be available for in the next few days, as mentioned by the bank. The service for recharge of prepaid mobile phones will also be available shortly. These new services scale up the total number of banking services available to ICICI Bank customers on WhatsApp to 25. The bank had launched a host of services on WhatsApp six months ago.