Paymate plans rail tickets via SMS

Paymate, a leading mobile commerce company, is in talks with Indian Railways to implement a system for booking tickets through SMS and has signed 3,000 online merchants including Rediff and Indiatimes to offer mobile payment option.

"We are in dialogue with IRCTC for offering the option of railway ticket booking through an SMS from the mobile phones," Ajay Adiseshan, founder and MD, Paymate told PTI.

The company has already tied up with online merchants such as Rediff, Naukri, Jeevansathi, Indiatimes, Makemytrip, Travelmart India, Cleartrip, Future Bazaar and Fabmall.

Even Taj Hotels, Adlabs Multiplex and Oxford Bookstore would offer a mobile payment option to their customers. 

The service is currently being offered to Citibank credit card and banking customers while other leading banks will join shortly, Adiseshan said.

"The mobile payment option now covers about 85 per cent of India's e-merchants which witness an average eight million transactions every month," he said.

Paymate has been spun off by Coruscant Tec in May 2006 and is being funded by Silicon Valley-based Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures who have helped build some of the world's leading brands like Amazon, Google and Sun Microsystems.

"Our aim is to enable, build and offer the largest possible ecosystem to catalyse m-commerce growth and after e-merchants we would focus offline merchants from the next quarter," Adiseshan said.