SMS Banking

After understanding how SMS works, now we try to know about application what sms can provide to us. As I mentioned before, that SMS and Voice is a primary services in one operator. SMS can work in SS7 domain and IP domain, can have interconnection to other element such as ESME ( External Shortcode Messaging Entity ) as known as Service Provider.

The one of application of  Service Provider is for SMS Banking. What is SMS Banking ? With SMS banking, a customer can do more advantages and get rid from lose time to check their need of cash flow in their account.
They can check their balance easily, check  currency, check their three latest transaction, checking for claim partner such as electric bill, credit card bill, water bill, phone billing etc.
They can also do some transaction such as transfer inter and intra bank account, do some payment and check wheter the cash transfer already received or not.

Customers just do registeration by sending sms to appropiate shortcode, and then waiting their status. The bank application will reply their SMS with another shortcode which consists of status and help list to do transaction to bank related.
So, a shortcode is based on what bank related which do a cooperation with operator.
Bank application as an ESME will do sharing revenue with the operator based on the agreement signed by both side.
The costumers must somethings to do before registeration process, they are

• be corcerned  bank customer related of course : p
• register the number phone in ATM bank related
• Registeration in ATM ( Automated Teller Machine) is the process to get the TIN ( Telephone Identification Number )
• After that, Application Bank will send you an SMS and give the menu list you have to do to complete the registeration

See again the diagram in ‘what is SMS‘ articles which i put again here :

SMS bank application is an ESME in that picture. So to build the application we have to build the element network and connection to SMS Gateway before reach the SMS Center of the operator.
SMS bank application can make connection using several connection to reach SMS Center. The connections are SMPP anf HTTP.
SMPP is a standard protocol in IP network used by SMSC to build connection to other element IP network.

The common connection used in operator is HTTP ( Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) to do hit SMS banking application.  From here we have to consider about acknowledgement time ( ack) between SMSC and application.
Operator and Bank Person should define the correct ack time based on their agreement. If the connection exceeded time ack between them, we can find message timeout hit, and then the request from subscriber cannot reach the application. So it is mandatory to have good connection of IP network here.

In operator side security issue still be major factor  to be optimized. The authentication based on IP address of ESME, firewall IP, username and password, and appropiate shortcode define in SMS Gateway should be thought seriously because this is related with the customer Bank data transaction. If not customer can complain to operator if they feel the data stolen by another unresponsible person.

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• SS7 : Transaction Capabilities Application Part (TCAP)
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