Mobile Banking System

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- Abbreviations and Acronyms

FS

Functional Specifications

RS

Requirement Specifications

MBS

Mobile Banking System

Telco

Tele-communication Providers

- Mobile Banking System

- Introduction

Mobile Banking is an independent platform which enables the bank’s customers to perform basic transactions through their mobile handsets. Unlike web based banking and Mobile application banking (which are already covered in FCDB), these transactions can be initiated even through a basic mobile handset which doesn’t have internet access. This uses USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Services Data) protocol which is used to communicate between various GSM mobile telephones with their respective service provider’s computers.

Independent platform implies that, this service doesn’t depend on any existing Gateway Services from UBS. This would be introduced as a separate module where parsing of the Incoming Request, manipulating it, validating it and providing a response in an external system understandable format would be taken care by UBS. Mobile Banking would be having its own maintenances and transactions including the related tables. Both the technical and the Business Aspects of this entity would be discussed in detail below.

- Entiti[c]es of Mobile Banking System

There are four main entities in MBS as listed below. These are classified based on the operations which each of them would be able to perform.

- Distributors

- Agents

- Merchants

- Customers

- Distributors

This entity can be considered as the root, this may be the bank’s branch itself or a private party registered to the branch as an authorized distributor. They control the operations of the child entities registered under them. Each distributor is mapped to a particular account/GL in the MBS system through which the transactions are made. The account numbers would follow the format already existing in FLEXCUBE and these accounts/GLs may be mapped to this entity using a separate maintenance. Distributors are further categorized as follows

- Main Distributors

- Child Distributors

Main Distributors:

These are the entities which have their own independent accounts created. They can act independently and all the transactions made, affects their own account created.

Child Distributors

These are the entities that functions as a group. Many distributors can be mapped to a single account and the transactions happening throughout all the distributors affects only the single account to which those distributors are mapped. The re-conciliations are done based on the unique distributor ID and the transaction reference.

- Agents

Agents form the next level in the Hierarchy. Agent is an entity which would be dealing with the actual customers/consumers. Agents can be an individual or a private entity which would be enrolled as an Agent in the MBS under one particular Distributor. An Agent can be enrolled under only one Distributor at a given point of time. Transfers of Agents are also allowed by which the Agent would be unmapped from one particular Distributor and mapped to another Distributor based on the Request from the Agent. Based on the mode of operation Agents are also classified into two as follows.

- Main Agents

- Child Agents

Main Agents:

These are the entities which have its own independent MBS account and all the transactions performed affect that particular account. For Instance, an agent having high volumes of transactions in a given time can be categorized as Main Agents and provided with a separate MBS accounts and Low volume accounts can be clubbed as Child Agents, which rests on the decision of the Bank.

Child Agents:

These are the entities which are mapped to the same MBS account number, i.e. Multiple Child Agents have the same MBS Account Number and all the transactions performed by each of them would affect the same MBS account and Reconciliation would be done by the transaction ID and the Agent ID.

- Merchants

These are the next entity in the MBS. Merchants are Small/Medium scale Vendors who deal with Retail Products. For Example, A small electronics shop or a large Retail Chain can be a registered merchant of the Bank. Once registered, based on the terms of the contract each merchant would be provided with a Unique Merchant ID and its corresponding MBS account number. The Customers of those merchants, who are already a registered MBS customer, can directly transact between their MBS account and Merchant’s MBS Account.

- Customer

The customer forms the bottom most entity in the hierarchy, and customer may be anyone who is a valid Mobile User. Each customer willing to enroll for the Mobile Banking Service has to walk-in to the nearest agent to fill up the required documents, post scrutinizing and KYC checks an MBS customer ID and the MBS account number would be allotted using which the customer would be able to perform transactions.

The whole mobile banking system revolves only around the above mentioned entities and the system would be capable of carrying out transactions between these entities based on the maintenances done. The types of transactions handled would be discussed in detail below.

- Maintenances to be allowed for MBS

- Entity Maintenance

Each entity in MBS has to be mapped to an Account or GL in the UBS system and this starts with the Entity Maintenance screen. Each entity is identified by a unique Entity ID which would be a 10 digit Alpha numeric code. The other fields that would be captured are as