Islamabad - In order to protect consumers’ sensitive and financial data during mobile phone banking State bank and Pakistan Telecommunication Authority will work jointly to devise regulatory frame work.

Chairman PTA Syed Ismail Shah while addressing the signing ceremony of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between PTA and State Bank on Monday announced that PTA and SBP will jointly supervise and monitor the operations of mobile banking services. Operators and AFIs will put in place an effective complaint handling mechanism, he said.

Shah further said that PTA will issue quality of service benchmarks, regarding network availability, resource availability, reliability, priority SMS, message delivery and security standards.

Highlighting potential of mobile banking he said there is a huge incentive to capitalize on the next generation mobile banking opportunities and all institutions should work together to include the unbanked population in banking services through digital platforms in the next 5 years. Chairman said that, telecom operators will ensure confidentiality of end user authentication and technical transactions related data.

State Minister IT, Anusha Rahman Ahmad Khan, said that, the objective of the strategy is to build momentum in order to achieve financial inclusion targets of National Financial Inclusion Strategy that also aims at providing access to 50 percent of the adult population by 2020.

She said there are almost 29 million mobile broadband subscribers in Pakistan, telcos and financial institutions should put efforts to tap this potential.

Ashraf Mahmood Wathra Governor, State Bank of Pakistan, while speaking at the event, said that MoU signed between PTA and State Bank will be remembered as a mile stone in the history of telecom and banking sectors. He further said that branchless banking is a modern facility for the people of Pakistan, it will bring convince of use to the customers and a positive impact to the GDP growth of the country.

CEO, and President Mobilink Jeffrey Hedberg, said in financial year 2014-15, mobile account base more than doubled, reaching to 11 million mobile accounts and more than 100 million transactions valuing PKR 500 billion were move through his company’s platform every quarter.

According to officials of PTA, SBP and PTA partnership will develop a cohesive regulatory framework that leads towards achieving the common objective of providing the low cost mobile banking services.