OREANDA-NEWS. The Alfa-Mobile banking system has become a 2007 CNews AWARDS winner in the category for financial services management. Participants in the awards ceremony made their choice via direct e-voting and pushed the Alfa-Mobile service into the lead with 56 votes, leaving behind it two competitors from the banking sector.

This mobile banking system, developed by Alfa-Bank in 2005, has emerged as the first ingenious example of innovation happening in this area. Alfa-Mobile provides a remote service through which users can manage their accounts in any place and at any time. Clients can check account balances and confirm transactions. In addition, they can make a wide range of payments by mobile phone, including inter-account money transfers, payments for mobile telecom and Internet services, and repayment of credit cards.

Currently Alfa-Bank’s mobile service is used by more than 15 thousand customers and grows by 100-120 clients weekly. Payment for mobile telecom services is the most popular feature (1300-1500 transactions a week) and the average transaction amount is 450-500 rubles. Some 400 inter-account transfers, amounting to 70 million rubles, are made per week.

The main constraint of many of the IT services currently provided by banks is that they are complex and therefore inconvenient to use. Alfa-Mobile’s advantage lies in its simplicity. An interactive application, developed by Russian company Trafficland, uses GPRS technology to generate the necessary adjustments for every type of phone and delivers them to their users in a special SMS format. The customer only needs to save this message on the phone and activate the required settings. Due to technological innovations like these, Alfa-Bank continues to heighten its appeal in the competitive banking market.