The Inter Bank Mobile Payment Service which is presently offered by 13 banks in the country is expected to be extended by a dozen more banks by the end of the fiscal, according to the Mobile Payment Forum of India.

"The switching service of mobile payment transactions across banks is currently provided by the National Payment Corporation of India and Settlement of funds is by the Clearing Corporation of India Limited.

"IMPS is presently offered by 13 Banks and 12 more are expected to offer the same by the end of March 2011," MPFI said.

MPFI is a joint initiative by Rural Technology and Business Incubator of IIT-Madras and Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology.

Customers find IMPS very convenient, and useful not only to know account balance status through the mobile phone sitting at home but to do funds transfer from anywhere and anytime with confirmation of payment transaction in real time, MPFI said.

Presently, the service is offered free of cost by some banks to encourage customers to learn and experience the convenience of new technology based Mobile Banking solution.

MPFI hopes that in future also the cost of mobile payment transaction would remain to be very low and affordable because the volume of transactions would scale up very high along with increase in the number of users of this modern technology based ubiquitous service.