Banking SMS-notifications, or How to save 5 billion rubles a year

Very often, our Russian clients ask us: “What if there is a need to receive SMS from banks during a trip?”. The fact is that our application allows you to receive only calls when you change the SIM card , SMS forwarding in the application is not yet possible.



As we try to adhere to the “Lean Startup” doctrine, we tried to find out how big the problem is and whether it can be solved in alternative ways.



The most obvious way to solve this problem is to replace the SIM-card each time you need to make a payment, receive an SMS and change the SIM-card again. As you know, this is not the most convenient way.

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The need to notify users about transactions in a bank account is dictated by the Federal Law “On the National Payment System”. Article 9, Clause 4:

“The operator on the transfer of funds is obliged to inform the client about the performance of each operation using the electronic means of payment by sending a corresponding notice to the client in the manner prescribed by the contract with the client.”



As can be seen from the text, there is no mention of SMS, and it seems like banks can choose any way of informing: call, letter, personal message in social networks or instant messengers, push notifications, etc. But most banks use SMS without the possibility of choosing an alternative.



But the alternative proposal would be beneficial first of all to the banks themselves, and here's why. Every month, Russian banks send 1.7 billion SMS to their customers, for which they spend about 850 million rubles. About 50% of all subscribers of cellular networks currently use smartphones. And among users of Internet banking, smartphone owners are probably 100%. This means that with the introduction of alternative methods of notification (push-notifications, messages in messengers, e-mail, etc.), banks could save a little more than 5 billion rubles a year!



In fairness, it should be noted that in order to save money, some banks already offer an alternative in the form of push notifications or messages through their own applications. But, unfortunately, there are very few such banks - only a few.



In addition to financial benefits, the rejection of SMS notifications can increase the security of online transactions. It is not a secret for anyone that the existing infrastructure of mobile communication is outdated from the point of view of security, and it is easy to intercept the call, and especially SMS. ( Here and here you can read about the methods of attacks on cellular networks.)



We found at least two Russian companies that have set out to help banks - these are Tim Connect and Wings.



Tim Connect sends push notifications to a user-installed application. If the user has not entered the code within a certain time, the notification is duplicated by SMS. In our opinion, the disadvantage of this solution is the need to install a separate application to receive notifications from the bank.



Wings is working on deeper integration with banks by embedding its service directly into banks' client applications.



In addition, the company Pushall offers a universal platform for sending push notifications of all categories, perhaps such a solution would also be suitable for banks. But as in the first case, the installation of a separate application is required.



Anyway, we believe that the most promising solution would be a solution whereby the user could receive a confirmation code in any of the instant messengers that are identified by phone number, such as Viber, Whatsapp, Telegram and, why not - AVO . With this approach, there is no need to install an additional application, and the messenger interface itself is more familiar to users.