Coming soon: Credit card payments through ATMs

NEW DELHI: Soon, you will be able to pay credit card bills from ATMs, using debit cards. The US-based Euronet Services is developing a platform that would enable credit cards holders of a bank to pay bills using ATMs of another bank.
The company''s Indian arm, Euronet Services, manages 1,103 ATMs, outsourced by seven banks like Citi, IDBI, Standard Chartered and Centurion.It also provides value-added services like selling additional talk time to mobile phones at 11,666 ATMs of 12 banks like ICICI, HDFC, Citi and SBI.
Euronet India MD Loney Antony said the company has initiated discussions with three leading credit card issuer — ICICI Bank, CitiBank and Standard Chartered Bank — to launch the service.
At present, credit card holders pay their bills by cheques or debit cards of the same bank whose card they use. For instance, to clear your HDFC credit card bills, you must have savings account in the same bank to have the required debit card.
Banks like HDFC, ICICI, SBI, PNB, Citi, Standard Chartered and UTI give free debit cards to their account holders to access their ATMs.
Antony said Euronet was also developing some other services that could be launched through ATMs. He said ATMs could be used to pay other utility bills like electricity and water. But for this, the utility companies and card issuers banks would have to join hands to share the data.
Euronet Services India has networked 3,761 ATMs of nine banks called, Cashnet. This enables, debit/ATM card holder of one bank to use the ATMs of other bank at Rs 25 per usage.
This charge is shared by the ATM owner bank which takes Rs 21 and the network provider Euronet, Rs 4. However, many times, banks absorb the cost and do not pass it to customers.
But, if one is using the ATMs which are not in the shared network, the charge is around Rs 40 per usage. Like Euronet network, there are other network also like Mitra and Cash Tree.