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AKARTA: Bank Internasional Indonesia (BII) launched on Tuesday a mobile banking service to provide services such as account management, funds transfer, reloading pre-paid cell phone accounts and bill and online shopping payments.

“The investment was somewhere between US$300,000 to $500,000, mainly for the mainframe and network,” BII consumer banking manager Stephen Liestyo told reporters at the launch ceremony.

Stephen said BII customers could use the service to transfer funds to more than 80 banks connected to ATM Bersama, ALTO, and Prima networks.

“Fund transfers are limited to Rp 25 million [$2,900] a day and Rp 10 million per transaction, in accordance with Bank Indonesia regulations,” he said, adding that currently only rupiah transfers were available.

Stephen said the service was available through several platforms: SMS, SIM Application Toolkit, USSD Menu Browser (UMB) and a Java applet for BlackBerrys that could also be accessed from Nokia smartphones. Similar applications were not developed for the less popular iPhone and Android smartphone platforms, he said.

BII electronic transaction channel head Laksono said that the bank targeted 50,000 mobile banking users by the end of the year with 300,000 mobile transactions per month. — JP