NTT DoCoMo and Mizuho Bank are reportedly planning to launch a micro payment banking service using cellphone handsets.
By using the bank agent system that permits non-financial companies to deal with financial services, the cellphone giant will launch the service in this summer as soon as Japan’s monetary authority approves it. The new service allows you to pay public utility charges and mail-order bills over the cellphone.
The service is capable of transfering money between two individual parties as well. If both of a sender and a receiver are DoCoMo’s subscribers, the sender will be allowed to make a transaction only by entering the receiver’s phone number instead of his/her banking account number. The amount of money transferred will be charged to the sender’s monthly phone bill. The maximum limit of the amount is set to 30,000 yen (approx. USD300) a month for security reasons, and the cellphone company expects the new service will be used for various life scenes such as collecting expenses from intended attendees prior to a party, and sending money from the parents to their children who live apart.
In a similar case, last summer KDDI and Bank of Mitsubishi-Tokyo UFJ (BTMU) jointly founded a bank[J] targeting KDDI’s cellphone service users, but it requires to set up a new banking account and that prevents their business going through. The partnership of NTT DoCoMo and Mizuho Bank requires no application for a new account, and it means the new service generates 50 million banking accounts in a moment, that would be a threat not only for KDDI/BTMU but also for other financial institutions.
Masaru IKEDA