Guest Lecture by Mr. Chandrashekhar Bhide

We were very fortunate to have on campus Mr. Chandrashekhar Bhide, DGM & Head - mBanking/mPayments at Idea Cellular Ltd for a guest lecture. The session was arranged by the Alumni Committee with support from our esteemed alumna Ms. Dimple Kaul of the batch of 2003. Mr. Bhide delivered an enriching lecture on m-commerce and digital payments. He enlightened students about the various aspects of m-commerce including but not limited to online wallets, contactless payments, direct carrier billings, payment gateways and social lending. In addition, he covered in great detail the various stakeholders and their roles in mobile commerce, like the regulator, banks, telcos and internet service providers, merchant aggregators etc. His explanation of using mobiles as Point of Sale machines with the help of devices like the ‘Square’ was especially interesting.

The students, being active participants in m-commerce themselves, related to the topic and enthusiastically posed questions to the guest, who happily obliged with answers. The wide array of queries he fielded ranged from credit card transactions, profit margins of online merchants; security of m-commerce and the battle between telcos and banks for share of customers in the m-commerce space. He concluded the lecture with a short note on the possible future of m-commerce: where mobile phones would be the channel of choice, remittances would become as easy as calls or emails and biometric identifiers would be the order of the day.

We are indeed thankful to Mr. Bhide for visiting our campus and sharing his insights with students.