Mumbai, Nov 27 (KNN)  The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has asked banks to charge customers the actuals for SMS alerts sent to them, rather than a fixed annual fee.

"Considering the technology available with banks and the telecom service providers, it should be possible for banks to charge customers based on actual usage of SMS alerts," the central bank said in a notification to all scheduled commercial banks, yesterday.

“Accordingly, with a view to ensuring reasonableness and equity in the charges levied by banks for sending SMS alerts to customers, banks are advised to leverage the technology available with them and the telecom service providers to ensure that such charges are levied on all customers on actual usage basis,” it added.

RBI in its notification referred to its March 2011 directive in which it had asked banks to put in place a system of online alerts for all types of transactions irrespective of the amounts involving usage of cards at various channels.

Banks had accordingly put in place a system of SMS alerts so as to help customers in fraud mitigation and have been levying uniform service charges to various categories of customers.

However, over the last year, a few banks began to charge a fixed annual amount for SMS alerts and other banks followed suit.  (KNN/ES)