Bank of Kigali (BK) will launch Short Message Service (SMS) banking this month to assist its clients to easily access their bank accounts, the bank’s Marketing Manager, Januario Mucyo, said on Thursday.

The Rwf30m project targets 56,000 subscribers by the end of this year with 560, 000 transactions per month.

Mucyo said, the bank intends to work with all telecom operators but at the moment they will start with MTN Rwanda.

"Depending on the cost of an SMS from a particular telecom operator, we will be subsidizing  the cost for alerts and responses (transactions), and the cost will also depend on the number of services that the user has applied for,” Mucyo explained.

He added that the product involves a wide range of services including requesting for account balance, account movement alerts and forwarding information about a transaction that occurred on the account.

It will also facilitate account statement request, check book request and electricity voucher request. 

How the service will work

The first step is sending a pull SMS — where a user sends a request to the bank. The bank then responds through a push SMS— a message from an SMS banking application server to the clients mobile phone.

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