AFTER A SIMILAR GROWTH IN 2010 BCR"s "good.bee Tranzacţii Mobile" expects to double its number of customers in 2011

"good.bee Tranzacţii Mobile" (ed. note: "Mobile Transactions", a service offered by the Romanian Commercial Bank (BCR) which allows customers to do banking operations using their mobile phone, has doubled its number of users to 29,000, in 2010, and the company expects a similar growth rate next year.

After the first year of operations, the service already had 15,000 subscribers, said Cătălin Moise, the managing director of good.bee Service RO.

He said that since the beginning of the year, not only has the number of customers of the good.bee service doubled, but so did the number of operations it handled, to around 100,000.

Out of the total number of users, 15-20% are active customers.

Half of the operations intermediated by "good.bee Tranzacţii Mobile Transactions" are made using the mobile phones, 40% using ATMs and POSs and 10% using other channels.

Over 75% of the transactions take place among "good.bee" accounts.

The average amount of the transactions is 100-150 lei.

Users of the service don"t pay any monthly maintenance fees, only the fee which is withheld for each operation. The fee is 1.15 lei for operations performed between two good.bee accounts, and 1.8 lei for operations involving other banks.

The official of the company said that there is a plan to introduce a unified lower fee in the first quarter of 2011.

The good.bee "Tranzacţii Mobile", service, which is operational 24 hours a day, allows customers to send and receive money, check the balance of their account, see the details of the last three transactions performed, pay invoices and recharge mobile phone pre-paid cards.

The company "good.bee Service RO" was created through a partnership between the "Erste" Foundation and "Erste Group" in 2009, and in October 2010 was taken over by BCR.