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CITIBANK, the world’s largest credit- card issuer, is
testing how credit-card transactions through mobile
phones will fare in the country.
The
bank, which has a country office in the financial
district of Makati, says it sees a potential where it
can grow and expand its client base by programming
mobile phones as a credit card.
“The
Philippines is a place where Citi is testing its mobile
service. The continued popularity of SMS [short
messaging service] presented us an opportunity to
introduce CitiMobile,” said Citibank country business
manager Mark Jones.
The bank
on Friday launched CitiMobile, a mobile-phone system
that allows credit-card holders to make purchases in
seven partner establishments without having to swipe
their credit cards.
“With
this innovation, our more than one million cardholders
can now charge payments through their mobile phones,”
Jones said.
The bank
currently has 1.2 million cardholders in the country.
Clients enrolled in CitiMobile will have to send their
authorization through text messages to charge their
purchase to their credit cards.
Citibank
said the country has over 53 million mobile-phone
subscribers, 95 percent of which are prepaid users.
Filipinos send 288 billion text messages a year, or
about 800 million a day.
The bank
said there are one billion mobile-phone subscribers in
the Asia-Pacific region. Of 2.3 trillion text messages
sent across the globe a year, 1.5 trillion are from Asia
and the Pacific. Sixty percent of Citibank’s credit-card
holders in the country are prepaid subscribers.
Citibank
holds 30 percent of the credit-card market in the
country.
The new
mobile system will allow credit-card holders to buy
prepaid mobile phone and Internet credits using their
handsets. |
