Beena Parmar Moneycontrol News
ICICI Bank, India’s largest private sector bank by assets, has launched a mobile banking app for rural customers which provides access to banking services as well as information on agriculture services.
“Mera iMobile, the app, allows users in rural areas to avail as many as 135 services on their mobile phone, helping them to save the time and cost of visiting a branch to avail these services,” ICICI Bank said in a statement. “The list of services include Kisan Credit Card, Gold Loan, Farm Equipment Loan and loans to Self-Help Groups (SHGs). The app also enables them to undertake an array of frequently used banking services from their smartphone, without using mobile internet services.”
Any ICICI Bank customer with a rural savings account/Kisan Credit Card/Gold Loan/Self-Help Group/other agri loans can download ‘Mera iMobile’ from the Google Play Store on their Android smartphone. Non-ICICI Bank customers can also download to use the agriculture advisory related services.
The app will be available in eleven Indian languages.
The bank said that it is the first bank to offer agriculture-related information such as crop-wise mandi prices of nearly 230 crop varieties across 460 mandis. It also displays taluka-wise weather update for close to 3,700 talukas across and over 300 districts, helping farmers to plan their sowing and harvesting activities under a single mobile app.
Chanda Kochhar, MD and CEO, ICICI Bank said, “Mera iMobile enables any user, even if they are not ICICI Bank customers, to download the app and get access to agri-related advisory on mandi prices and weather. These will aid in saving time and effort of travel to the branch and the mandi for various services.”
Mera iMobile has been specially created to be “light” to enable customers in rural and semi-urban markets to download and run it even with low internet speed. To further aid quick download of the app, the bank will introduce WiFi-enabled posters’ at its rural and semi-urban branches. To begin with, these posters will be deployed across 700 of the bank’s branches.
The bank also plans to mount these posters on vans and cycles to enable download of the app at places with high footfalls like haats and common areas in villages.
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